Pakistan struggles to stop Afghan heroin

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/04/20/pakistan_struggles_to_stop_afghan_heroin/

QUETTA, Pakistan --A small airplane with a heat-seeing camera flies over moonlit, craggy desert along the Pakistan-Afghan frontier, circling suspicious convoys of vehicles that appear with amazing clarity on a monochrome screen.

In an effort to improve border security and stanch the flow of heroin trafficked from top world producer Afghanistan, the U.S. has supplied Pakistan with 10 Huey helicopters and three Cessna Caravan planes with high-tech surveillance equipment.

But a chronic shortage of dedicated ground forces to pounce on smugglers limits their impact. And rampant corruption that a former Afghan trafficker says infects security forces and officials on both sides of the border helps fuel the booming narcotics trade to Pakistan, across Europe and the United States.

The war on drugs plays second fiddle to the war on terror along Pakistan's border and draws little foreign funding, though this is a key route for narcotics coming from Afghanistan, which grew enough opium last year to refine about 450 tons of heroin.

[RufusEarl]

1. CIA

As long as the CIA are running things in Afghanistan, the poppy Fields will flourish. Out side this forum not many people even know about the poppy fields in Afghanistan, and the old USofA like it that way.

As you know before the US took over Afghanistan, the Taliban has just about eradicated the poppy fields, now that the US is in charge the poppy crop has increased something like 80%.

They have to fund that war someway i suppose, but really heroin! That poor country needs crops that will feed the population, not fill the pockets of the warlords.