- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
Below is an excellent article on the opium issue in Afghanistan. They provide a very good overview of how the opium production finances Taliban activity and how farmers have no choice but to grow poppies. They give good ideas on how to lessen or stop the opium production in the country but like most ideas you have to convince others to go along with them.
more on link: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IE18Df05.html
Opium in Afghanistan: A bad trip
By Hayder Mili and Jacob Townsend
The opium economy in Afghanistan is a key component of the counterinsurgency campaign, yet remains one of the most difficult issues to tackle. It is a critical problem facing international efforts to create a functional government in Kabul that can prosecute counter-terrorism on its own territory.
A successful counter-narcotics intervention would have the added benefit of undermining an important terrorist funding source in arenas as diverse as Chechnya, Xinjiang and Central Asia.
While coalition and Afghan officials regularly acknowledge the power that the narco-economy has over their ambitions, it has proved exceptionally challenging to turn this into a national strategy that incorporates counter-narcotics into counterinsurgency and provides the resources for its execution. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium production had a boom year in 2006, rising to 6,100 tonnes.
This marked a 49% increase over 2005, yielding an estimated US$755 million to farmers on the basis of a slightly decreased farm-gate price of $125 per kilogram of dry opium. With the national government's revenues at less than $350 million for 2006, the opium economy is a formidable financial power base beyond the state's control. Good weather conditions are expected in 2007, suggesting another huge harvest.
Any national counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan must begin with a preface noting the geographical variations of the country. In 2006, the southern province of Helmand accounted for 46% of Afghanistan's opium production. To the east of Helmand, Kandahar produced 8%. In other words, the majority of Afghanistan's opium economy is built on production in two southern provinces. Of the remainder, 25% is produced in the northern belt close to the borders with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, with lighter concentrations in the eastern and western provinces.
Based on the UNODC's observations of recent opium planting, southern pre-eminence is likely to intensify further in 2007. [1] The distribution of production correlates strongly with areas of ongoing insurgency/terrorism and coalition fatalities. Using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's divisions of Afghanistan, Regional Command South, which includes Helmand and Kandahar provinces, is where 62% of the country's opium is produced and where the coalition has suffered close to two-thirds of its combat deaths. [2] Basically, people are dying where poppies are thriving.
The difference between the relatively calm north and west and the militarized south and east should be reflected in approaches to counter-narcotics. Opium is undoubtedly a governance problem across the country. In the south and east, however, it is also strongly related to the Kabul government's most immediate existential threat - the Taliban-led insurgency - as well as to the funding of 139 suicide attacks in 2006. [3]
more on link: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IE18Df05.html