KABUL: Sitting and eating quietly on his father's lap, the 18-month-old boy was oblivious to the infection running through his veins. But his father, a burly farmer, now a widower and father of four, knew only too well. It was the same one that killed his wife, the boy's mother, four months ago. The man started to cry. "When my wife died, I thought, well, it is from God, but at least I have him," he said. "Then I learned he is sick too. I asked if there is medicine and the doctors said no. They said, 'Just trust in God.'" [continues 1514 words]
NATO Battles Rising Hostility in Afghanistan The fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan continues this spring. But as the number of civilian casualties rises, support for Western troops is dropping. The grave is 14 meters long. The white flags with golden characters flutter in the wind at the tops of bamboo poles. The inscriptions are verses from the Koran meant to guide the dead into the afterlife. Abdullah Shah stands alone in the Da Mirwais mini Hadira cemetery in western Kandahar, his hands raised to the sky. After completing his prayers, the old man strokes his face and his white beard, as ritual requires. Twenty people are buried beneath the mound of earth at Shah's feet: his wife Miamato, his three sons, 13 grandchildren, two daughters-in-law and a cousin. They died in Lakani, a village in the embattled Panjwai district in southern Afghanistan, at 2:30 in the morning on October 25, 2006. Their lives were extinguished by fire from the 30 mm guns of an American A-10 ground attack aircraft, aka Warthog. [continues 2412 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Thousands of NATO troops have moved into Afghanistan's biggest opium-growing region to repel an expected springtime counterattack by a resurgent Taliban. The offensive in Helmand province seeks to cut off drug money that is a major source of funding for the Islamic rebel militia. Analysts say the NATO force will be challenged by comparatively low troop levels and its inability to chase Taliban fighters as they slip in and out of neighboring Pakistan. "The Taliban is based in Pakistan," says James Dobbins, a former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan. "No Afghan-based operation can do it lasting damage. The best we can do is set them back on their heels." [continues 454 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan -- When the deal went down in Las Vegas, the seller was introduced only as Mr. E. In a room at Caesars Palace hotel, Mr. E exchanged a pound-and-a-half bag of heroin for $65,000 cash, unaware that the buyer was an undercover detective. The sting landed him in a Nevada state prison for nearly four years. Twenty years later, Mr. E, whose real name is Izzatullah Wasifi, has a new job. He is the government of Afghanistan's anticorruption chief. [continues 436 words]
The Radical Plan To Legalise The Opium Trade It is a brazen idea. But support is growing for claims that the best way to attack the Afghan opium crisis is to harness it as a legitimate supplier to a hungry international pharmaceutical industry. The argument is that faltering efforts to eradicate opium in Afghanistan are a misguided waste of billions of dollars. Between them, the US and British governments have already pledged $US2 billion to anti-narcotics campaigns here, but much of it leaks to corruption or is sunk in security and judicial revitalisation projects that will take years to bear fruit. [continues 1129 words]
It is a brazen idea. But support is growing for claims that the best way to attack the Afghan opium crisis is to harness it as a legitimate supplier to a hungry international pharmaceutical industry. The argument is that faltering efforts to eradicate opium in Afghanistan are a misguided waste of billions of dollars. Between them, the US and British governments have already pledged $US2 billion to anti-narcotics campaigns here, but much of it leaks to corruption or is sunk in security and judicial revitalisation projects that will take years to bear fruit. [continues 1130 words]
U.S.-Backed Plan Angers Farmers, May Aid Taliban DOBUNDI, Afghanistan - (AP) Anguish creased the weathered face of the opium farmer as a U.S.-trained eradication team swept through his farm fields in this southern Afghan village. With helicopters buzzing overhead, dozens of tractors plowed up Sadullah Khan's sprouting poppy plants, which in two months time would have yielded the sticky resin used to make heroin -- and earned him, by Afghan standards, a generous income. After failing miserably to curb opium production last year, the Afghan government has launched a renewed eradication drive, particularly here in Helmand province -- which accounted for more than 40 percent of 2006's record yield of 6,725 tons. The U.S. government estimates the opium trade generates $3 billion a year in illicit economic activity. [continues 867 words]
Taliban Heartland: Eradication Under Way In Afghanistan DOBUNDI, Afghanistan - Anguish creased the weathered face of the opium farmer as a U.S. trained eradication team swept through his farm fields in this southern Afghan village. With helicopters buzzing overhead, dozens of tractors plowed up Sadullah Khan's poppy plants, which in two months time would have yielded the sticky resin used to make heroin and earned him, by Afghan standards, a generous income. After failing to curb opium production last year, the Afghan government has launched a renewed eradication drive, particularly here in Helmand province which accounted for more than 40 percent of the 2006 record yield of 6,725 tons. The U.S. government estimates the opium trade generates $3 billion a year in illicit economic activity. [continues 366 words]
AFGHANISTAN has warned it could unravel into a terrorist-backed narco-state unless Australia and the rest of the international community send specialist police to combat the heroin trafficking which is funding the Taliban insurgency. The war-battered nation's ambassador to Canberra, Mohammed Anwar Anwarzai, said yesterday Australia's military deployment had helped build local trust, but a dangerous vacuum existed in the wake of their withdrawal last year. Afghanistan's woes include the unenviable reputation of being the world's biggest supplier of heroin. [continues 360 words]
As NATO braces for a spring Taliban offensive in Afghanistan, many in the Bush administration, the Congress and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime are calling for it to take on a prominent role in combating the narcotics trade. Although this task is meant to help Afghanistan repress the worrisome, if predictable, expansion of its opium economy, it will greatly hamper NATO's effectiveness. NATO's crucial role is to establish security throughout the country -- and not to dilute its focus in eradication and interdiction missions that are presently bound to fail. It is not that NATO should simply turn a blind eye to the opium trade. [continues 703 words]
Afghan officials in Washington are redoubling their advocacy efforts to capitalize on Congress and the Bush administration's renewed focus on their country -- and to prevent their country from slipping back into Taliban hands. Embassy officials are calling the Bush administration's drug-eradication policy in Afghanistan a flawed solution to the problem and are speculating on how a new U.S. ambassador to their country will influence the struggle against the narcotics trade and how the U.S. will change the management of foreign aid there. [continues 918 words]
LONDON -- Counter-narcotics policies in Afghanistan need to be urgently overhauled before they push the people of southern Afghanistan into the arms of the Taliban insurgency, a security think tank said yesterday. A poppy-eradication program that began last month has already sparked a new wave of violence, said Norine MacDonald, president of the Senlis Council, a European security think tank. She said the program was costing NATO the popular support it needed to counter a looming Taliban offensive. [end]
I went to Afghanistan to help rebuild people's lives. But I learned the hard way that good intentions aren't enough. The news came in a phone call from Afghanistan. Ten days ago, a suicide bomber tried to talk his way into a compound in Lashkar Gah where I had worked until last October. He blew himself up without getting in and no one else was seriously hurt, but the story shook me. What I had expected for so long had finally happened. [continues 4303 words]
LONDON -- A Pakistani sewed opium into the beads of a tapestry. An Afghan taped bags full of drugs to his body. A Chinese woman tucked narcotics into hollowed heels. Afghan Gen. Aminullah Amarkhil says he arrested them all, and that has been the source of all his problems. The Afghan government, however, accuses Amarkhil of corruption and wants him returned to his homeland for questioning. Until October, Amarkhil was a top customs official in the world's largest opium producing nation, responsible for halting the flow of drugs through Afghanistan's main airport. Now he is seeking asylum in London, saying that his life is in danger from drug lords who pressured the government to fire him amid corruption charges. [continues 558 words]
LONDON - A Pakistani man sewed opium into the beads of a tapestry. An Afghan taped drug bags to his body. A Chinese woman tucked narcotics into hollowed heels. Afghan Gen. Aminullah Amarkhil says he arrested them all, and that has been the source of all his problems. The Afghan government, however, accuses Amarkhil of corruption and wants him returned to his homeland for questioning. Until October, Amarkhil was a top customs official in the world's largest opium producer, responsible for halting the flow of drugs through Afghanistan's main airport. Now he is seeking asylum in London, claiming his life is in danger from drug lords who pressured the government to fire him amid corruption charges. [continues 566 words]
The Kabul government is planning to take the war to its illegal drugs trade. And once again, it will put Britain's exhausted troops back into the firing line. British troops in southern Afghanistan, already engaged in stiff fighting with the Taliban, face a new threat as the Kabul government prepares to crack down on the country's rampant drugs trade. The Independent on Sunday has learned that in the next week to 10 days, 300 members of the Afghan Eradication Force (AEF), protected by an equal number of police, will begin destroying fields of ripening opium poppies in the centre of lawless Helmand province, where Britain has some 4,000 troops. While British forces will not be directly involved in the operation, commanders concede that they will have to go to the aid of the eradication teams if they encounter armed resistance. "A backlash is definitely possible," said one senior officer. [continues 1171 words]
Afghan Farmers Often Have Little Alternative KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Canadian diplomats are quietly trying to steer Afghan counter-narcotics agents away from a proposal to use chemical spraying to destroy opium-producing poppy fields. Responding to international pressure, particularly from the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government is seriously looking at instituting an aerial spray program to combat the explosion in the illegal narcotics trade. "The Canadian position on eradication ... is that it is one of the pillars of the Afghan national drug control strategy," said Gavin Buchan, the political director of the provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar. [continues 406 words]
How To Solve Afghanistan's Drug Problem The British Empire once fought a war for the right to sell opium in China. In retrospect, history has judged that war destructive and wasteful, a shameless battle of colonizers against colonized that in the end helped neither side. Now NATO is fighting a war to eradicate opium from Afghanistan. Allegedly, this time around the goals are different. According to the modern British government, Afghanistan's illicit-drug trade poses the "gravest threat to the long term security, development and effective governance of Afghanistan," particularly since the Taliban are believed to be the biggest beneficiaries of drug sales. [continues 743 words]
Liberal MP Suggests Alternatives to Destroying Critical Afghanistan Crop Opium is a key element of the current conflict in Afghanistan. Opium poppies are now a form of livelihood for many farmers. But U.S. commanders with NATO forces have ordered poppy fields destroyed, sending farmers stripped of their livelihood straight to the Taliban. At least the Taliban and drug lords allow the farmers means to put food on the table, Liberal MP Keith Martin (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca) said. "The Americans only want to destroy more of the poppy crop, which drives the subsistence farmers to the Taliban." [continues 331 words]
Liberal MP Offers Alternatives To Destroying Afghanistan Crop Opium is a key element of the current conflict in Afghanistan. Opium poppies are now a form of livelihood for many farmers. But U.S. commanders with NATO forces have ordered poppy fields destroyed, sending farmers stripped of their livelihood straight to the Taliban: at least the Taliban and drug lords allow the farmers means to put food on the table, Liberal MP Keith Martin (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca) said. "The Americans only want to destroy more of the poppy crop, which drives the subsistence farmers to the Taliban." [continues 329 words]
Much Gain, Less Pain How One Country's Problem Could Ease the World's Suffering An Abundance of Deadliness SOPHIE-MARIE SCOUFLAIRE, the chief pharmacist for the French humanitarian agency Mdecins Sans Frontires, has spent a lifetime watching people in disaster-stricken areas of the world writhing in pain.and she has put in many hours frantically trying to procure enough opiates to relieve her patients' agony. That is surprisingly hard. Part of the trouble is that most countries are allowed under a United Nations regime to import only a very small quantity of narcotics for medical use.and governments are often slow to apply for an increase in their quotas. Sometimes, sincerely or otherwise, they say they doubt their own capacity to handle increased quantities of drugs. So in a real disaster MSF has to beg the local health ministry to seek an increase. And in places where no government exists, MSF doctors go straight to the UN for permission to import drugs on their own responsibility. But that process is burdensome. [continues 559 words]
KANDAHAR CITY, Afghanistan - She strides into a dingy hotel restaurant, a diminutive Canadian lawyer with hired guns following behind. One of her men is a burly Australian who packs an automatic rifle. He installs himself at the hotel's entrance, his weapon hidden but at the ready. It's not unusual for civilians in this dangerous city to protect themselves with private security. But rarely does a woman move about in such a manner -- commanding an armed guard and eschewing a burka, or even a shawl, for male Afghan clothes. [continues 1293 words]
A CAMPAIGN of enforced crop-spraying to destroy the opium poppy fields will get under way in southern Afghanistan in the next few weeks, despite fears that it will undermine attempts to win the battle for hearts and minds with the Taliban. British defence and diplomatic sources claim the campaign is the result of "US political interference" and is throwing Nato plans into turmoil. Coupled with the imminent replacement of the British general commanding Nato troops with an American, the sources predict a breakdown in security. [continues 573 words]
On a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of Kabul, a couple of street kids gesture toward an unmarked iron gate behind which they assure us we can find what we are looking for. An Afghan guard gives us a wary once-over and opens the gate onto a dark garden at the end of which a door is slightly ajar. I open it and step into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul, where most women wear burqas and the vast majority of the population live in grinding poverty. [continues 2904 words]
Our Engineers on the Move It's one and a half kilometres of dust and gravel, running straight as a pool cue through the Arghandab River valley in the Panjwayi district. To Lieut. Anthony Robb, 24, of the 23 Field Squadron Combat Engineers, it could well be the most precious section of dirt in all Afghanistan. "When you consider all the bloody work we had to do during Op Medusa just claiming this ground, it's pretty important to us," he said, looking to where the flat stretch of dirt road turns past the town of Pashmul. [continues 596 words]
Opium, Thugs Bloom Under U.S. Policies in Afghanistan War A little more than five years since the start of the Bush administration's Afghan war, the "ousted" Taliban is back in full flower, and so is the notorious Afghan poppy. There's no doubt the two are intimately connected. The Taliban, which briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid, now both supports and draws support from that profitable crop; Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. [continues 1485 words]
US Drug Control Policy head John Walters announced that Afghanistan's poppy crops will be sprayed with herbicides in an effort to put a crimp in the country's booming opium and heroin trade. But the Afghan government, which is not enthusiastic about spraying, has yet to confirm Walters' pronouncement. This year, Afghan opium production increased 49% over last year, and the country produced 6,100 metric tons of opium, or 670 tons of heroin. That's 90% of the illicit opium supply, and more than the world's junkies can shoot, smoke, or snort in a year. This as the US spent $600 million on anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan this year. [continues 236 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan - The top U.S. anti-drug official said Saturday that Afghan poppies will be sprayed with herbicide to combat an opium trade that produced a record heroin haul this year, a measure likely to anger farmers and scare Afghans unfamiliar with weed-killers. John Walters, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said Afghanistan could turn into a narco-state unless "giant steps" are made toward eliminating poppy cultivation. "Proceeds from opium production feed the insurgency and burden Afghanistan's nascent political institutions with the scourge of corruption." [continues 156 words]
The top U.S. anti-drug official said Afghan poppies would be sprayed with herbicide to combat an opium trade that produced a record heroin haul this year. The Afghan government has not publicly said it will spray, but John Walters, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said President Hamid Karzai and other officials had agreed to ground spraying. [end]
Kabul, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghanistan's criminal underworld has compromised key government officials who protect drug traffickers, allowing a flourishing opium trade that will not be stamped out for a generation, an ominous U.N. report released Tuesday said. The fight against opium production has so far achieved only limited success, mostly because of corruption, the joint report from the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said. The findings show a "probability of high-level (government) involvement" in drugs, said Doris Buddenberg, the UNODC's Afghanistan representative and co-editor of the report. [continues 709 words]
KABUL: Afghanistan will take a generation to wipe out the opium trade, which is fed by graft and the grip of a small but increasingly powerful band of drug lords with political connections, a new UN and World Bank report says. Efforts to wipe out opium fields often hit poor farmers the most and care must be taken to avoid making the situation worse, said the report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Bank on Tuesday. [continues 416 words]
U.S.-Backed Efforts at Eradication Fail Opium production in Afghanistan, which provides more than 90 percent of the world's heroin, broke all records in 2006, reaching a historic high despite ongoing U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts, the Bush administration reported yesterday. In addition to a 26 percent production increase over past year -- for a total of 5,644 metric tons -- the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61 percent. Cultivation in the two main production provinces, Helmand in the southwest and Oruzgan in central Afghanistan, was up by 132 percent. [continues 822 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan --- Afghanistan's criminal underworld has compromised key government officials who protect drug traffickers, allowing a flourishing opium trade that will not be stamped out for a generation, an ominous U.N. report released Tuesday said. The fight against opium production has so far achieved only limited success, mostly because of corruption, the joint report from the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said. The findings show a "probability of high-level (government) involvement" in drugs, said Doris Buddenberg, the UNODC's Afghanistan representative and co-editor of the report. [continues 573 words]
Report: Heroin Trade Thrives U.S. and European efforts to end heroin production in Afghanistan have done little to hamper the drug industry and have hurt the country's poorest people, according to a report by the United Nations and the World Bank. The report, released today, is the latest indication of the difficulties faced by the British-led effort to eradicate Afghanistan's opium crop, which drives the economy in parts of the embattled nation and has helped to fund a resurgence of the Taliban. The report says the cultivation of poppies that produce opium, from which heroin is made, permeates daily life in Afghanistan, and eliminating the illegal drug trade there could take decades. [continues 350 words]
Afghanistan's war on drugs has been marred by corruption that has strengthened the grip of an increasingly powerful mafia on the country's narcotics trade, a report by the World Bank and United Nations said. Over the past five years, the British-led counter-narcotics strategy had penalised the country's poorest farmers and strengthened networks of organised crime, consolidating the trade among a tiny elite of traffickers, the damning report said. "Around 25 to 30 key traffickers, the majority of them based in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions." [continues 380 words]
New Zealand Troops in Afghanistan Have Destroyed a Haul of Opium With a Potential Street Value of US$12 Million ($18m). The almost one tonne of drugs was confiscated on November 1 by a team of Afghan National Police after they caught up with smugglers on a deserted road. The New Zealand Defence Force in Bamyan received a call from the province's governor Habibi Serabi asking if they could incinerate the drugs. Wooden pellets filled with opium were stacked on top of each other and doused in petrol before being set alight. [continues 177 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Farmers now planting opium poppies in Afghanistan will probably reap a harvest comparable to this year's record crop, in part because insurgents are preventing effective counternarcotics work, officials said Thursday. Planting is under way in southern regions responsible for the bulk of the estimated 6,100 metric tons of Afghan opium produced in the 2005-06 growing season. Anti-drug officials say that despite anti-cultivation campaigns, they foresee little improvement by harvest time next spring. Drug production has skyrocketed since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban regime five years ago. Last spring's poppy harvest accounted for 92 percent of the global opium supply and was enough to make 610 tons of heroin--more than all the world's addicts consume in a year. [continues 461 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan farmers now planting opium poppies will probably reap a harvest comparable to this year's record crop, in part because insurgents are preventing effective counternarcotics work, officials said yesterday. Planting is under way in southern regions responsible for the bulk of the estimated 6,100 tons of Afghan opium produced in the 2005-6 growing season. Drug production has skyrocketed since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban regime five years ago for giving refuge to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda camps. Last spring's poppy harvest accounted for 92 percent of the global opium supply and was enough to make 610 tons of heroin - more than the world's addicts consume in a year. [continues 203 words]
KABUL - NATO-led troops killed 38 suspected insurgents in two separate confrontations in southern Afghanistan, and western troops and Afghan police elsewhere seized over nine tonnes of marijuana from a truck, officials said Wednesday. The fighting in Kandahar's Zhari and Panjwaii districts on Tuesday targeted rebels who were attacking the alliance's "development efforts" in the area, said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force. Details on the fighting were not available, nor was the nationality of the troops involved. [continues 372 words]
VANCOUVER -- Corruption and drug-trafficking stemming from Afghanistan's poppy crops pose the biggest threat to coalition efforts to nurture a stable government in the country, U.S. Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry said yesterday. Speaking via teleconference from the U.S. embassy in Geneva to the Asia Pacific Summit in Vancouver, Lt.-Gen. Eikenberry -- commanding general with combined forces command in Afghanistan -- said the poppy- growing problem is big enough to warrant a strategy aimed at providing an alternative economy, not just alternative livlihoods for poppy farmers. [end]
Canadian and United Nations experts are dismissing key elements of a report by an international think-tank that urges Canada to take the lead in developing new NATO strategies in Afghanistan such as legitimizing poppy production to meet Third World demands for painkillers. The Senlis Council report, originally released in June, was submitted to a symposium yesterday, where the Conference of Defence Associations dismissed its main recommendation as superficial and nonsensical. The paper by Norine MacDonald, the development and security think tank's lead field researcher in Kandahar province, says the military situation in southern Afghanistan has declined dramatically in recent months due largely to a failure to win the hearts and minds of the local populace. [continues 219 words]
Canada must immediately launch an emergency food program to relieve the growing hunger crisis in southern Afghanistan, says the president of an international development and security think-tank. Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald, the founding president of the Senlis Council, told a news conference yesterday that a famine has started to take shape in the cities and towns that neighbour Canada's military base in Kandahar. "Children are starving to death literally down the road from the Canadian military base in Kandahar," said Ms. MacDonald, who has spent the past year in southern Afghanistan and has helped document the rise of refugee camps in Kandahar and in surrounding towns. [continues 673 words]
Deciding to Fight Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets. Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa. He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers' association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk covered with papers and business cards -- ambassadors, N.G.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It was day's end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book, called "The Benefits of Koran." [continues 4730 words]
One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20's fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" -- middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque. [continues 5294 words]
Afghanistan's opium production has soared "out of control," the U.N. drugs and crime agency warned Tuesday, adding that proceeds from the opium harvest were being used to fund the resurgent Taliban. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is calling on NATO and Afghan troops to attack heroin labs, opium bazzars and convoys transporting the narcotic, said Preeta Bannerjee, a spokeswoman for the agency. Opium production in Afghanistan rose 59 percent in 2006 to a record 165,000 hectares (408,000 acres) -- representing 92 percent of the world's opium, according to U.N. figures. [continues 451 words]
The Afghan government has ordered the closure of all offices of a group that wants to promote new ways of dealing with the global drugs problem. The Interior Ministry said the Senlis Council, had been "confusing farmers" and had been a factor in the increase in poppy cultivation. Senlis has suggested the legal use of Afghan opium for medical purposes. A spokesman for Senlis said it had not received any formal notification that its offices were to be closed. He denied its activities had increased poppy cultivation. [continues 58 words]
Taleban fighters using giant Afghan marijuana forests for cover are proving a tough foe to smoke out, the head of Canada's armed forces has revealed. Thickets three metres (10ft) high readily absorb heat, making them hard to penetrate with thermal devices, said Gen Rick Hillier in a speech in Ottawa. "You really have to be careful the Taleban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he added. Burning them is not an option as they are laden with water, the general said. [continues 227 words]
DASHTAK, Afghanistan -- The village of Dashtak sits on a bumpy, washed-out specter of a road, an hour's drive off the main highway between Kabul and Afghanistan's lawless southeast. It has 16 new wells financed by an aid agency. But the village men who gather around a visiting journalist offer a litany of complaints: no paved roads, no running water, no electricity, and the closest health clinic is two hours away by donkey. Their frustration boils over when talk turns to 10 villagers recently arrested on suspicion of aiding insurgents. [continues 1415 words]
Afghans Reconsider: Taliban Opium Profits Prompt Bold Promise JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- With profits from this spring's record opium crop fuelling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they are considering a once-unthinkable way to deal with the scourge: spraying poppy fields with herbicide. Afghans, including President Hamid Karzai, are deeply opposed to spraying the crop, but U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for it. Last week, Afghanistan's top drug enforcement official said he would contemplate spraying opium crops -- even with airborne crop-dusters -- if other efforts fail to cut the size of the coming year's crop. [continues 192 words]
JALALABAD, Afghanistan - With profits from this spring's record opium crop fuelling a broad Taliban offensive, Afghan authorities say they are considering a once-unthinkable way to deal with the scourge: spraying poppy fields with herbicide. Afghans including President Hamid Karzai are deeply opposed to spraying the crop. After nearly three decades of war, western science and assurances can do little to assuage their fears of chemicals being dropped from airplanes. But U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for it. And on Thursday the country's top drug enforcement official said he would contemplate spraying opium crops -- even with airborne crop-dusters -- if other efforts fail to cut the size of the coming year's crop. [continues 318 words]
Inside Afghanistan
