Afghan counternarcotics minister resigns amid another huge poppy crop

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Afghan counternarcotics minister resigns
amid another huge poppy crop

Published: July 8, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan: Afghanistan's counternarcotics minister
has resigned only weeks after Afghan laborers finished
cultivating an opium poppy crop that is expected to equal or
exceed last year's record haul.

Habibullah Qaderi submitted his resignation to President Hamid
Karzai about five days ago, Gen. Khodaidad, the deputy minister,
said Sunday.

The resignation was voluntary and was driven in part by health
problems, he said, though Qaderi has taken a new position in
Canada as Afghanistan's consulate general.

Qaderi headed the ministry since December 2004 and survived
several Cabinet reshuffles, but Afghanistan's poppy crop has
ballooned under his watch and the country's production last year
accounted for more than 90 percent of the world's heroin supply.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/08/asia/AS-GEN-Afghan-Drugs.php

[pocoloco]

1. Take the money and run.

Better places than Afghanistan to retire to!
And if he isn't ready I know where he can get job!

[EST]

2. While I am no particularly enamored of the heroin traffic this

crop will support, I do hope that it will help to refocus the so-called "drug war" and achieve a more realistic and less harmful approach.

When one considers the enormous cost of ignorance and fear around the issue of drugs, the fact that gangs are primarily supported by black market money from drugs, the fact that no burglar or robber would be ripping and killing to get a "fix" if drugs were free or very cheap, the fact that there would probably be no opium crop-or only a small one-if it weren't for the "war" on drugs, the benefits of a new approach are obvious.

[Jade Fox]

3. Poppy growing in Afghanistan is......

how the poor of that country survive. Poppies are easy to grow, being basically weeds, and there's always a market.

Until there is some other way for the rural poor of Afghanistan to make a living, poppy growing will be nearly impossible to stop. Simply destroying the poppy crops condemns people there to starvation, since little else will grow in their harsh climate.

This is my understanding, anyway.

[John Q. Citizen]

5. The people are used by the higher ups to make it all happen. Drugs are always

a good cash crop. But it's a lot more complicated than that.

The Taliban had almost stopped opium production, had really turned it around. Then the bush mafia came in and viola!

The same thing is happening in Columbia. We pay mercenary Corporations to wipe out the food crop and small farmers have to grow coca to survive and buy the food they can't grow because the arial spraying wipes it out. Coca can be grown within a few weeks of spraying and survive, food crops take a good six months to a year to be able to be grown agin where the spraying has taken place.

It's no accident, it's a scam.

[Jade Fox]

6. Thanks for the info....

Are you saying the U.S. government is in the drug business? If so, why? What's the point, however illogical, of perpetuating global drug use? I'm not doubting your information, just trying to understand.

[John Q. Citizen]

7. Read the history of the Iran/Contra affair. The same folks who are in power now

sold weapons to Iran, used the profits from the Iranian sales to ship weapons and military supplies to the Contras (our mercenary force in Nicaragua,) then the planes returned from Central America loaded with Cocaine which was sold here, and those profits were used to buy more weapons to sell to Iran, and the cycle repeated itself. It was a way to conduct the rightwing agenda outside governmental constraints, enrich the middle men, and pay for the entire operation off the books.

The US Government as a whole isn't in on this. But elements within the government have been doing it quite successfully for a long time now. There is of course historical precidence for this. Britain did it quite openly in India and China in the 19th century. They grew opium in India and shipped it to China. When the Chineese Throne tried to stop the trade, Britain went to war to preserve their market. (The short military struggle is known as th Boxer Rebellion)

If you are interested in documentation I suggest you read Daniel Hopsickers excellent investigative jouranlism book called "Berry and the Boys," about Berry Seals, Americas all time top cocaine importer. He was busted and then went to work for the CIA, where he continued to move cocaine and herion but with protection.

Also see the investigative journalism series "Dark Alliance" written by Gary Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News about the Iran-Contra-Cocaine connection. The cocaine shipped in to fund the Contras was the very beginning of the crack-cocaine epidemic that started in Los Angeles and then spread across the country. One of the local dealers in LA who was selling the Contra -Coke learned how to make it into smokable form (aka "crack") and the rest is histry, a sad history indeed.

http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm

[John Q. Citizen]

4. Where ever the CIA goes, from Latin America to Southwest Asia, to

Indochina, the drugs always, always, always start flowing freely.

I'm sure agent Mike hasn't a clue why. though.

[ohio2007]

8. Farmers can't make enough growing potato's

to match what drug dealers offer them for the cash crop they sell to the west

[John Q. Citizen]

9. Yes, and the drug dealers are often powerful connected US government

officials/employees.

I mean, we can read licence plates from satalites. But for some reason, those pesky "criminals" keep moving tons of drugs at will across multiple boarders, process tons of drugs at will, and for some reason we can't seem to read thier license plates. Or intercept their boats, or find out who owns their planes. Very mysterious.

[frylock]

10. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Nearly 20 years ago, McCoy wrote The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia , which stirred up considerable controversy, alleging that the CIA was intimately involved in the Vietnamese opium trade. In the current volume, a substantially updated and longer work, he argues that pk the situation basically hasn't changed over the past two decades; however the numbers have gotten bigger. McCoy writes, "Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced in large part to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations." He readily admits that the CIA's role in the heroin trade was an "inadvertent" byproduct of "its cold war tactics," but he limns convincingly the path by which the agency and its forebears helped Corsican and Sicilian mobsters reestablish the heroin trade after WW II and, most recently, "transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin." Scrupulously documented, almost numbingly so at times, this is a valuable corrective to the misinformation being peddled by anti-drug zealots on both sides of the aisle. First serial to the Progressive.


From Library Journal
It seems that the American government has learned nothing from its war on drugs. In 1972, the CIA attempted to suppress McCoy's classic work, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia ( LJ 11/15/72 ) , which charged CIA complicity in the narcotics trade as part of its cold war tactics. Now, this revised and expanded edition, incorporating 20 years of research, discusses in almost overwhelming detail how U.S. drug policies and actions in the Third World has created "America's heroin plague." McCoy notes that every attempt at interdiction has only resulted in the expansion of both the production and consumption of drugs. He also charges that 40 years of CIA protection of Asian drug traffickers and active participation in the transport of opium and heroin has undermined U.S. anti-drug efforts. A massive work that raises serious questions. For larger public and academic libraries.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global-Trade/dp/1556524838/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8424040-7127049?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183920120&sr=8-1