Reuters: Afghan president sees 15-year fight against opium

[Eugene]

Afghan president sees 15-year fight against opium

By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent
Reuters
Thursday, September 21, 2006; 8:36 PM

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Eradicating Afghanistan's surging opium production
and weaning poor farmers from growing the raw material for heroin will take
at least 10 to 15 years, the country's president said on Thursday.

President Hamid Karzai said desperation after decades of war and poverty drove
Afghan farmers to turn orchards and vineyards into fields of poppy, which now
accounted for 30 percent of his country's economy.

Stamping out opium production "will take more than two or three or five years,"
he said, citing the experiences of former opium producers Thailand, Pakistan and
Turkey, which each took more than a decade to curb poppy growing.

-snip-

Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR2006092101523.html

[babylonsister]

1. Sorry, that's a bunch of bullshit. Fight against opium?

That's their main crop, people are getting rich, supply is bigger than demand, and no one is stopping them.
Wrong war.

[saigon68]

8. Mayor of Kabul is drinking again

He needs to go to betty ford to DRY OUT.

LOL

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

2. Funny thing, opium production was down

Until the U S A showed up. Then they started growing poppies again.

[Demit]

7. I think it was the Taliban who cut down production. I remember reading

that the reduced poppy crop yields was linked to the recession in, what was it, 2000? Not long after we came in in 2001, crop levels went right back up. It's huge in the world economy. Props up a lot of economies.

[Union Thug]

3. Hey, they want a free market, here's the opportunity...

There's a demand and here's a supply. What a great economic opportunity for a war torn country. :)

Geezus, dear god, it's a poppy.

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. He dropped about 3 zeros off that estimate.

[teryang]

5. how are anglo-american banks gonna cure the trade deficit?

700 billion off the books goes a long way.

[daleo]

6. This made me wonder about the coup in Thailand

Maybe the CIA had to make sure there was a reliable alternate supplier available before the poppy crop in Afghanistan could be eradicated.:tinfoilhat:

[acmavm]

9. Where do these clowns pull these time tables numbers from?

Out of a hat, from out of their asses?

They're starting to sound like the stupid bunch of raving lunatics that they are.

[PurityOfEssence]

10. which they'll lose

Fight longer; they'll still lose.

When there's a crop that reaps HUGE amounts of money in a land of the uneducated and desperately poor, that crop will be grown.

With any luck, the reactionaries won't be able to get a total stranglehold on our media and this period of bellicose posturing will be shown for what it is.

Meanwhile, people do what they do to make a living.

[mhatrw]

11. It took exactly four years to ramp up production to world record levels

once we invaded.

From almost zero to the most ever in four years of US military intervention.

Funny that. Isn't it? And it's not the first time.

http://www.countercurrents.org/ipk-saleem150703.htm

Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the Red Army out of Afghanistan. The last Soviet soldier walked out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989. Interestingly, between 1982 and 1989, while the CIA was in league with the Mujahideen, Afghan opium production ballooned from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1989.