Quote:
Originally Posted by Rog
the reason he gave for being in afghanistan was to 'kick his heroin addiction' which to me is like buggering off to columbia to kick your coke habit or down the pub to kick your alcohol habit.....it just don't follow.
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I am not sure if you are aware but the Taliban eradicated the production of poppy from their country while they were ruling. Interestingly enough, since the US 'liberated' Afghanistan, the whole production is back in action. And it is even mentioned
here that the Taliban is once again using the money from the poppy to fund itself. I can't help but take this as an absolute lie put out by the US government to brainwash the people into making the Taliban look like the 'badguys'.
From 8 years ago:
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST)
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.
A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.
Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said. Opium -- the milky substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 1999 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said -- more than all other countries combined, including the "Golden Triangle," where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.
The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.
The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.
This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, Frahi said. The rest -- about 175,000 acres -- was clean.
taken from:
http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html
I really find it extremely difficult for the Taliban to have turn on their heals now, and allow poppy to be grown again.