Record opium crop helps the Taliban fund its resistance

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Britain faces a war on two fronts in Afghanistan, following the revelation that the province where British troops are deployed has become the biggest source of illicit drugs in the world.

In an annual survey of opium production released yesterday, the UN reported that Helmand province had produced 48 per cent more opium compared to its record-breaking crop last year. Opium production in Afghanistan as a whole will reach a "frighteningly new level" at 8,200 tons, 34 per cent higher than last year, the report said.

British troops sent to back up reconstruction efforts in Helmand have been pinned down by resurgent Taliban fighters, who have a stranglehold over the drugs trade which is funding the resistance.

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Government corruption, particularly what Mr Costa calls the Karzai administration's "benign tolerance of corruption" is also blamed for the explosion in the opium crop.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2901006.ece

[frylock]

1. the politics of heroin in southeast asia

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.

http://www.amazon.com/politics-heroin-Southeast-Asia/dp/0060129018/ref=sr_1_3/103-7258118-6925432?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175134242&sr=8-3