As opium prices soar and allies focus on Taliban, Afghan drug war stumbles

[unhappycamper]

As opium prices soar and allies focus on Taliban, Afghan drug war stumbles
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 14, 2011; 12:00 AM

KABUL - After several years of steady progress in curbing opium poppy cultivation and cracking down on drug smugglers, Afghan officials say the anti-drug campaign is flagging as opium prices soar, farmers are lured back to the lucrative crop and Afghanistan's Western allies focus more narrowly on defeating the Taliban.

That combination adds a potentially destabilizing factor to Afghanistan at a time when the United States is desperate to show progress in a war now into its 10th year. The country's Taliban insurgency and the drug trade flourish in the same lawless terrain, and are often mutually reinforcing. But Afghan officials say the opium problem is not receiving the focus it deserves from Western powers.

"The price of opium is now seven times higher than wheat, and there is a $58 billion demand for narcotics, so our farmers have no disincentive to cultivate poppy," said Mohammed Azhar, deputy minister for counternarcotics. "We have gotten a lot of help, but it is not enough. Afghanistan is still producing 85 percent of the opium in the world, and it is still a dark stain on our name."

International attention to Afghanistan's drug problem has waxed and waned over the course of the war, often as a result of shifts in Western priorities as elected governments have changed and conflict with Islamist insurgents has intensified.

In the first several years after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, U.S.-led policy was military-driven and drugs were not seen as a critical issue. Poppy cultivation, once banned by the Taliban, surged. By 2004, the U.S. and British governments stepped in with programs to eradicate poppy, encourage farmers to grow other crops and train Afghan police and prosecutors in how to combat drug trafficking.

[Webster Green]

1. This is horrible.

All we can get around here is Mexican tar heroin. I would love a fat ball of Afghani opium.

Dammit!

[Bragi]

2. Why, it's almost like the occupation is doing no good

Is here anyone who doesn't think that Afghanistanis are just waiting out the U.S occupation so they can go back to whatever they were doing before Bush invaded?

How many lives must be lost, how much more treasure burned, before the U.S gets its sorry ass out of there?

[madokie]

3. I wish

I could have opium for my pain instead of the hydrocodone shit I take now