ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

Poppy is a labour intensive crop, so even landless labourers get some small share of the profits.

It is more effective than aid at reaching the poor, one development worker told me.

This year in Nangarhar, growing poppies is not an option.

In Juma Khan’s district, farmers have been arrested for breaking the ban.

Some men spoke about joining the Taleban to make money, they pay their fighters £70 ($140) a month, or the Afghan National Army who pay rather less. [emphasis added]

But you’ll not be hearing about this in mainstream American press.

Keith Hennessey, a top economic-policy adviser to President Bush, says “gut-level public opinion” backs the White House.

Funny that they pay attention public opinion in these matters, but not in matters of Iraq nor Afghanistan.

Record illegal drug production in Afghanistan supplies the Taliban insurgency with money and arms and the U.S.-backed government must take direct, prompt action against poppy growers, a State Department report said Friday.

So sorry we ruined your country and didn’t fix it. Can you please kill your peasant farmers for us and ruin pretty much your entire country’s GDP?

Hey, surprise, just like in Iraq, we actually fucked shit up worse in Afghanistan than when it was under the brutal, repressive Taliban dictatorship.

Via Wiki [emphasis mine]: In 2000, the Taliban had issued a ban on opium production, which led to reductions in Pashtun Mafia opium production by as much as 90%.^[68] Soon after the 2001 US led invasion of Afghanistan, however, opium production increased markedly.^[69] By 2005, Afghanistan had regained its position as the world’s #1 opium producer and was producing 90% of the world’s opium, most of which is processed into heroin and sold in Europe and Russia.^[70] While US and allied efforts to combat the drug trade have been stepped up, the effort is hampered by the fact that many suspected drug traffickers are now top officials in the Karzai government.^[71] In fact, recent estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimate that 52% of the nation’s GDP, amounting to $2.7 billion annually, is generated by the drug trade.^[72] The rise in production has been linked to the deteriorating security situation, as production is markedly lower in areas with stable security.^[73]. The poppy eradication policy propagated by the international community and in particular the United States, as part of their War on Drugs, has been a failure, exacerbated by the lack of alternative development projects to replace livelihoods lost as a result of poppy eradication. Rather than stemming poppy cultivation, poppy eradication has succeeded only in adding to the extreme poverty in rural areas and general discontent, especially in the south of Afghanistan. Several alternatives to poppy eradication have been proposed, including controlled opium licensing for poppy for medicine projects.

So lets just kill or maim the farmers. After all, if they’re physically incapable of growing poppy, they can’t grow poppy!!

Turkey Told US, Iraq of Incursion Plan

This couldn’t possibly end badly. Going in to get the terrorists always works perfectly and everyone is happier immediately. Just ask Afghanistan. Or, um, Iraq.

Al-Qaida’s embrace of violence may be undermining the terrorist group’s support in the Muslim world, the nation’s top intelligence official said Thursday.

All we have to do to take advantage of this is to stop invading muslim countries. Gonna happen? I hope.

So what would they know about where the bombs come from. I mean, we bombed them back to the dark-ages civilization-wise, so it should be obvious that they wouldn’t know about the links to Iranian weapons that we claim are in there country. They must have ulterior motives, because we sure don’t have any ulterior motives about claiming Iran is doing bad things that would require us to invade them.  

The commander of NATO-led troops in Afghanistan said on Thursday a shipment of hi-tech roadside bombs intercepted in Afghanistan on September 5 had originated in Iran and it was difficult to conceive Tehran’s military did not know about it.

“Iran is our neighbor, is our friend and Iran has had major role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said during a visit to the western city of Herat on the border with Iran.

“The government of Afghanistan has no documents (to show) that Iran’s government is involved in the shipment of arms,” he told Reuters.

“I’m proud of the fact that we stood and fought in Afghanistan and we are standing and fighting in Iraq. And did we make mistakes? Yes. But are we on the right path? Yes,” he said, as Gates looked on. “Is it providing additional freedom for Iraqis and Afghanis, providing additional freedom for us at home? You bet. The more free people around the world, the stronger our democracy is and the safer our democracy is.”

So he considers a Taliban resurgence and the introduction of suicide bombing and our sluffing off our participation to NATO to be “standing and fighting?”

Don’t forget the fact that the opium trade now accounts for some grossly huge amount of Afghanistan’s GDP now that we’ve ruined the country.

Seriously, though, finally? Finding out why people hate us enough to kill us indiscriminately, making us hate them enough to kill people near them indiscriminately?

Six years after the September 11 attacks, a few cautious voices are beginning to suggest the unthinkable — maybe it is time to consider talking to al Qaeda.

Criminals should be brought to justice - but! if we continue that ideological slant to our foreign policy without joining international criminal courts, we have no rational standing by which to call ‘terrorists’ criminals and our soldiers ‘fighters for freedom and democracy.’ If there is no accountability for how we bomb multitudes of their brethren, how can we possibly act indignant when they kill a few of ours?

So says the AP of Washington’s role in the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in the 80…

Afghanistan is an example of how such tactics can backfire. The U.S. armed rebels in a Cold War proxy battle with the Soviet Union in the 1980s only to see the opposition groups fight one another in a subsequent civil war.

Conveniently forgetting to mention that one of those rebels was Osama bin Laden.

Of course, this was indirect, and they had no idea, apparently, who was getting all these arms the US was giving, even if they had, he was a nobody at the time. And, really, without that documentation being declassified we will never know for certain.

The U.S.A. might be able to proceed as follows:

• Put all troops in Iraq and Afghanistan under direct UN supervision.
• For every foreign UN troop sent to Iraq and Afghanistan afterward, take a roughly equal amount of U.S. troops home.
• Release all Guantanimo prisoners to an international war crimes tribunal. If they’re guilty they’ll hang, if they’re not, we’d be sending them home anyway and not trying to make examples out of them anyway, right?
• Engage in true multinational cooperation though the UN, instead of throwing tantrums until our way is gotten.
• Profit! Yes, indeed, corporate America will still reap in huge profits, just slightly less profits than we are currently used to. The caviar might have to downgrade slightly.

Of course, this will not happen. Where money is concerned, especially with large amounts, the more obscene the amount the more obscene people may become in their pursuit of it.