U.S. and Britain again target Afghan poppies (by paying them)

strollingbones

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The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

U.S. and Britain again target Afghan poppies

lets see....wehat and fruit saplings are a lot of work...poppy growing...not so much...drug dealers are gonna stay there...americans not so much....why work on roads and ditches when you can grow poppies ...who thinks this shit up?
 
Another record crop of poppies in Afghanistan...

US watchdog: Afghanistan poppy production at record levels despite massive counternarcotics efforts
October 20, 2014 — Afghanistan’s opium economy is booming despite $7.6 billion in U.S. counternarcotics efforts since 2002, federal auditors said in a report released Tuesday.
The most recent findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction come just a few months ahead of the withdrawal of coalition combat troops, when the vast majority of U.S. and NATO forces will leave the country. SIGAR cited a United Nations tally of net land area used for poppy cultivation in 2013: more than 500,000 acres, a 36 percent jump from the previous year and a historic record. The lion’s share of that cultivation, the U.N. says, comes from Helmand and Kandahar provinces, two regions that were the focus of the 33,000-strong American troop surge four years ago. “That is equivalent to more than 800 square miles — more than twice the size of all the boroughs of New York City, or 12 times the size of the District of Columbia — planted solid with opium poppies,” SIGAR wrote in a previous report in January.

Afghanistan remains the world’s top producer of opium, supplying more than three-quarters of the world as well as a growing domestic addict population, the U.N. report said. Along with illegal mining and extortion, the illicit drug trade is a major source of funding for the Taliban. International officials have said that the rebels are using the vast profits generated by the opium trade to buy ammunition and weapons and to fuel the insurgency. The SIGAR report said that poppy production had quadrupled in eastern Nangarhar province which was deemed poppy-free in 2008 and previously considered a model for eradication efforts.

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U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment observe the surrounding area near a poppy field during a security patrol in Shorab, Helmand province, Afghanistan

In its report, SIGAR included responses to its findings from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which said efforts to build up the Afghan government’s counternarcotics capabilities were “still in progress,” and from the Defense Department, which blamed the failure of poppy eradication on the “lack of Afghan government support for the effort.” Experts say the Taliban are not the only ones cashing in on opium. William Byrd, a senior expert on Afghanistan with the United States Institute for Peace and former head of the World Bank office in Kabul, suggested that elements of the Afghan government may be profiting from the crop just as much as the armed groups that oppose it.

Poppy profits fueling the Taliban insurgency aren’t the main danger, Byrd said. Instead, the principal threat lies in the corrupting capacity such huge sums of money have on a poor nation’s leadership, he said. “It’s not a simple equation, as there’s just not any black-and-white line.” Paradoxically, the Taliban had orchestrated one of the world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns before their ouster by a U.S.-led coalition in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The militants, in collaboration with the U.N., banned the growing of poppy, which resulted in a 91 percent drop in cultivation in the final year of their rule. But since then, opium production has increased virtually every year despite continuous efforts by the Afghan government, international agencies and coalition forces to persuade farmers to switch to other crops.

US watchdog Afghanistan poppy production at record levels despite counternarcotics efforts - Middle East - Stripes
 
US and British forces had no problem with selling opium to China....even started a war with China over it...twice...
 
Granny says, "Oh, look atta pretty poppies!...

Pentagon Expects Lull in Afghan Fighting for Poppy Harvest
Mar 14, 2016 | The Afghan army's struggling 215th Corps in southwestern Helmand province is expected to get some respite in the coming weeks as the Taliban turns its attention to the lucrative poppy harvest, according to the U.S. military.
Army Brig. Gen. Wilson A. Shoffner said that the recent spike in attacks in which the 215th Corps has lost ground to the Taliban in Helmand is expected to drop off in the coming weeks as the insurgents focus on securing the harvest and moving it to the smuggling routes through Pakistan and Iran. In Helmand, by far Afghanistan's major producer of opiates, the harvest moves "within the province from south to north as the weather allows, and we expect to see the same sort of pattern this year," said Shoffner, the main spokesman for NATO's Operation Resolute Support. "And so we anticipate that spike in activity [by the Taliban] will continue until about the latter part of March and then there should be a lull as the harvest gets under way," Shoffner said in a briefing from Kabul to the Pentagon last week.

The U.S., NATO and the Afghan government do little to interfere with the harvest. A spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which once had teams conducting raids around Afghanistan, said Monday that "We still have a presence there" but "the footprint there has been substantially reduced." Opiates have been and continue to be Afghanistan's largest exports, with an estimated annual value of nearly $3 billion, or about 13 percent of Afghanistan's Gross Domestic Product, according to the United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime, or UNODC. A typical Afghan farmer can get $200 for a kilogram of opium produced from poppy, according to the UNODC. The same amount of green beans will fetch $1. Shoffner estimated that the Taliban gets about half its funding from drug trafficking and taxing farmers to move the crop.

http://images.military.com/media/news/conflicts/afghan_poppy_field.jpg[/ijmg][/center]

In a speech last year, John Sopko, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said that the U.S. had spent a total of $8.4 billion on counter-narcotics programs in Afghanistan since 2002 with little effect. "The bottom line -- record opium cultivation and production -- clearly shows we are not winning the war on drugs in Afghanistan," Sopko said. As in past years, the Taliban fighters won't be the only ones taking a break for the poppy harvest. Desertion rates in the Afghan army usually increase during the harvest as troops leave their posts and return home to help their families bring in the crop that is worth far more to them than any substitute.

Shoffner said that the harvest was a factor in the high attrition rates for the 215th Corps but not the main one. "It is definitely not the driving factor in attrition. It's really failure of leadership to ensure that the soldiers are properly cared for, that they're properly led, although the poppy harvest will affect the entire country," Shoffner said. To cut down on corruption, the U.S. was trying to assist the Afghans in reforming the way troops are paid. "The method of payment had been a paymaster who would arrive at the unit with cash on hand. Obviously, that lends itself to corruption," Shoffner said. "So if you have leaders that are unscrupulous," he said, "that means the soldiers that need it are not getting it."

To stop that, the U.S. has recommended a $1.70 Afghan Security Forces identity card. "It's an ID card that has got a scannable strip on the back that has got all of the soldier's biometric data," Shoffner said. "And then, for accountability, that ID card is scanned" to allow the soldier to get paid," he said. "The ID costs about a $1.70 each. It works very, very effectively. And that allows them to have this automated computer database that is auditable, that's searchable, and it makes it much, much, more efficient in accountability."

[url=http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/03/14/pentagon-expects-lull-in-afghan-fighting-for-poppy-harvest.html]MORE[/url][/quote]​
 
Bumper crop of poppies providing Taliban with funds for offensive...

Taliban Gets 'Windfall' from Poppy Harvest to Fund Offensives
May 05, 2016 | The Taliban will reap "windfall" profits from a bumper poppy harvest in Afghanistan this spring to fund coming offensives, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul said Thursday.
"The poppy crop is really the engine that provides all the money that fuels the Taliban," and the insurgents were expected to benefit from "this very good poppy crop that they had this year," said Army Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland. "As a result, we do expect an uptick in Taliban efforts to attack" when the harvest is completed later this month, with offensives focused on southwestern Helmand province, the center of the Afghan narcotics trade, Cleveland, the deputy chief for communications of the Resolute Support mission, said in a video briefing from Kabul to the Pentagon.

afghan_poppy_field.jpg

Taliban fighters in recent weeks essentially dropped the fight to assist in the harvest, giving respite to the struggling 215th Division of the Afghan National Security Forces in Helmand province, Cleveland said. "A lot of the Taliban fighters have been out harvesting the poppy," he said. Once the harvest is complete later this month, "We think that will be the next big Taliban push," he said. "We think it will come in Helmand." The poppy trade in in Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin and is estimated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to be worth about $3 billion annually to the Afghan economy. Narcotics trafficking goes virtually unimpeded in Afghanistan. The U.S. has dropped its eradication and crop substitution efforts. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration still has an office in Kabul but no longer conducts field operations.

The United Nations estimated that the poppy crop fell by about 19 percent last year mostly due to poor weather, but plentiful rain this year was expected to produce a bumper crop. "We are happy that we had a good harvest this year compared with previous years," Abdul Rahim Mutmain, a farmer in Helmand, told The New York Times. "There is no security concern for a single laborer being checked or robbed by the police," he said. "The entire district is under Taliban control and the bulk of the harvesters are Taliban."

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The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

U.S. and Britain again target Afghan poppies

lets see....wehat and fruit saplings are a lot of work...poppy growing...not so much...drug dealers are gonna stay there...americans not so much....why work on roads and ditches when you can grow poppies ...who thinks this shit up?
I know, its the one cuntry in the world that is defensible. Why give up good living to be a debt slave in a feminist society, if your cuntry is defensible?
 
Afghanis growin' more poppies...
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Afghanistan's Deadly Poppy Harvest on the Rise Again
May 16, 2017 | WASHINGTON — The world's No. 1 opium-producing country, Afghanistan, is braced for an exploding poppy harvest this year, as farmers are cultivating the illicit crop in areas where it has never grown before.
“Unfortunately, the narcotics production is on the rise this year,” Javed Qaem, Afghan deputy counternarcotics minister, told international donors in Kabul Tuesday. “We are concerned that narcotics would increase this year, including in areas and provinces where previously we had zero opium production.” A new United Nations survey said Friday the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has increased by 10 percent, from 183,000 to 201,000 hectares, compared to the previous year, leading to a significant rise in the production of illicit opium. The illicit drug is fueling insecurity, violence and insurgency among other problems to discourage private and public investment in Afghanistan, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in its survey report.

A39F39BC-80AF-416F-B834-194A961062DE_cx0_cy4_cw0_w1023_r1_s.jpg

An Afghan man walks through a poppy field in the Surkhroad district of Jalalabad east of Kabul, Afghanistan​

Qaem's comments come amid growing international concern that the Taliban, who are fighting Afghan government troops in rural areas of the country, are fueling the poppy trade by engaging in trafficking and skimming hundreds of millions dollars in profit to fuel their militancy. Taliban insurgents, according to U.S. officials, net 60 percent of their war chest from narcotics.

Top producer of opium

Afghanistan is thought to produce an estimated 90 percent of the world's heroin. As poppy cultivation spikes, U.S. intelligence officials warn that the war-torn country is likely to see more armed violence this year. “The intelligence community assesses that the political and security situation in Afghanistan will almost certainly deteriorate through 2018, even with a modest increase in [the] military assistance by the United States and its partners,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a Senate hearing last week.

3A221770-EF69-46C3-B9D7-36D671F40FE1_w650_r0_s.jpg

Afghan farmers work on a poppy field in the Gereshk district of Helmand province, Afghanistan​

Since 2002, the U.S. has spent more than $8.5 billion on counternarcotics in Afghanistan — about $1.5 million a day, according to the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In addition to war, opium fuels corruption and organized crime in Afghanistan, a country already ranked among the five most corrupt states in the world by Transparency International. Only 13 of the country's 34 provinces were reported poppy-free in 2016, and this number has dropped into single digits this year, Afghan officials say.

Areas of cultivation increase
 

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