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By Allan M. Winkler
$16.29
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By Michael Dirda
$23
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Peter Galbraith, the former U.N. envoy who claims he was fired for trying to confront the election fraud in Afghanistan, says of Hamid Karzai: “In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports.” (video after the jump)
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AP / Musadeq Sadeq
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By Chris Hedges — The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban.
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If an athlete is caught cheating in the Olympics or another sports competition, that person is disqualified, and it is seen as a disgrace. In the case of the recent election in Afghanistan, however, cheating has been rewarded and even praised by no less than the president of the United States, says Link TV’s Jamal Dajani in this week’s “Mosaic Intelligence Report.”
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USAF / Staff Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock
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“Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed ... ,” The New York Times reports. That’s not quite targeted assassination, but it comes pretty close.
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YouTube / Al Jazeera
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The U.S. has decided to stop funding poppy field eradication in Afghanistan, declaring the policy a failure and a waste of money. Since 2003, opium production has gone up 40-fold in Afghanistan, making it the producer of 90 percent of the world’s heroin. But Britain, backed by the Afghan government, will continue destroying poppy fields as a way to stem the drug trade.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Bidgee
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Australians have found the source of a rash of mysterious crop circles: drugged-out wallabies. According to the attorney general of Tasmania, the kangaroo-like creatures have been eating opium poppies in fields grown for medical purposes, getting high and walking around in circles. Are you listening, Mel Gibson?
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AP photo / Rahmat Gul
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By Robert Fisk — The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands—all but a square mile at the centre of the city—and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul.
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A suicide bomber set off a deadly explosion near a mosque in a popular marketplace in Zaranj, Afghanistan, Thursday evening as men were gathering for prayer, killing 20 people and injuring about 30.
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guardian.co.uk
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More than 93 percent of the world’s opiates are now grown in Afghanistan, with an opium crop that has doubled in the last two years. According to the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, “No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities.”
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By Robert Scheer — While Bush was distracted with Iraq, the patrons of terrorism were very much in business back where the 9/11 attack was hatched, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state that provides a lucrative source of cash for the “evildoers” Bush forgot about.
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Opium production in Afghanistan is at the highest level ever recorded and shows an increase of 50 percent from last year. The increase in opium cultivation is a result of the resurgence of Taliban rebels. The head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said in a statement: ?The southern part of Afghanistan was displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption.?
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