Afghanistan the "forgotten" war?

[NMDemDist2]

Seymour Hersh (he "broke" the Me Lai story) in an article from this month's New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040412fa_fact


snip- Most alarmingly, according to a U.N. survey, nearly seventy per cent of farmers intend to increase their poppy crops in 2004, most of them by more than half. -snip-

Despite such statistics, the American military has, for the most part, looked the other way, essentially because of the belief that the warlords can deliver the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One senior N.G.O. official told me, “Everybody knows that the U.S. military has the drug lords on the payroll. We’ve put them back in power. It’s gone so terribly wrong.” (The Pentagon’s Joseph Collins told me, “Counter-narcotics in Afghanistan has been a failure.”) -snip-

The easy availability of heroin also represents a threat to the well-being of American troops. Since the fall of 2002, a number of active-duty and retired military and C.I.A. officials have told me about increasing reports of heroin use by American military personnel in Afghanistan, many of whom have been there for months, with few distractions. -snip- However, I was also told that there were concerns about heroin use within the Marines. The G.I.s assigned to Bagram are nominally confined to the base, for security reasons, but the drugs, the former intelligence officer said, were relayed to the users by local Afghans hired to handle menial duties. -snip- Asked separately about the allegations against marines, the Pentagon said that some marines had been removed from Afghanistan to face disciplinary proceedings, but blamed alcohol and marijuana rather than heroin.

He said on Democracy Now we could look forward to worse in the next few months. Oh chit chit chit

[patricia92243]

1. If we had put as much money and time into that country instead of Iraq,...

things would be quite different.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Afghanistan forgotten, once again --

[whatelseisnew]

3. kick

[electricmonk]

4. A jounalist friend of mine

Just arrived in Kandahar early this week. He's working for the Turkish news agency IHA as one of their few English speaking correspondents but is trying to put a documentary together in his downtime focusing on the "forgotten war" aspect of what's going on there. You can read his blog here. Updated every few days.