Download or read book Poppy Eradication in Afghanistan written by Sharon L. Firewicz and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poppy eradication in Afghanistan is not working. Despite the millions of dollars spent annually by the United States government, non-government agencies, and a variety of international partners, Afghanistan continues to be the global leader in the production of this illicit crop. Decades of war and political instability are making any attempts at eradication of the opium poppy in Afghanistan virtually meaningless. This landlocked and mountainous country, which has experienced years of drought, possesses limited ability to successfully produce most cash crops. Corruption and a lack of infrastructure make exportation difficult for replacement crops such as wheat or saffron, which can grow in this arid environment. Farmers drowning in debt are forced to plant poppy just to survive. The southwest, which contains the greatest concentration of poppy plants, is controlled by the Taliban. This violent terrorist group is utilizing funds from the sale of opium to support their reign of terror. Recognizing that our supply-side focus in the war on heroin is a failure, a partial change to the demand-side must be examined. Dissemination of information through education would be much less expensive and could prove beneficial. Embarking on a program to utilize Afghan poppy for the licit production of morphine for world wide consumption would aid the country in several ways: First, by improving the economic conditions of the people of Afghanistan; second, by engaging the tribal leaders at the local level to coordinate this program; and, finally, by helping to alleviate the world's growing demand for morphine-based pain medicines.
Download or read book Poppy Eradication in Afghanistan written by Sharon L. Firewicz and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poppy eradication in Afghanistan is not working. Despite the millions of dollars spent annually by the United States government, non-government agencies, and a variety of international partners, Afghanistan continues to be the global leader in the production of this illicit crop. Decades of war and political instability are making any attempts at eradication of the opium poppy in Afghanistan virtually meaningless. This landlocked and mountainous country, which has experienced years of drought, possesses limited ability to successfully produce most cash crops. Corruption and a lack of infrastructure make exportation difficult for replacement crops such as wheat or saffron, which can grow in this arid environment. Farmers drowning in debt are forced to plant poppy just to survive. The southwest, which contains the greatest concentration of poppy plants, is controlled by the Taliban. This violent terrorist group is utilizing funds from the sale of opium to support their reign of terror. Recognizing that our supply-side focus in the war on heroin is a failure, a partial change to the demand-side must be examined. Dissemination of information through education would be much less expensive and could prove beneficial. Embarking on a program to utilize Afghan poppy for the licit production of morphine for world wide consumption would aid the country in several ways: First, by improving the economic conditions of the people of Afghanistan; second, by engaging the tribal leaders at the local level to coordinate this program; and, finally, by helping to alleviate the world's growing demand for morphine-based pain medicines.
Download or read book The Afghanistan Papers written by Craig Whitlock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
Download or read book Poppies Politics and Power written by James Tharin Bradford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
Download or read book Afghanistan written by Christopher M. Blanchard and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: gov¿t., the U.S., and their partners, Afghanistan remains the source of over 90% of the world¿s illicit opium. Since 2001, efforts to provide viable economic alternatives to poppy cultivation and to disrupt drug trafficking and related corruption have succeeded in some areas. This report provides current statistical information, profiles the narcotics trade¿s participants, explores linkages between narcotics, insecurity, and corruption, and reviews U.S. and international policy responses since late 2001. It also considers ongoing policy debates regarding the counternarcotics role of coalition military forces, poppy eradication, alternative livelihoods, and funding issues for Congress. Tables and maps.
Download or read book The Global Afghan Opium Trade written by and published by UN. This book was released on 2011 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opiates originating in Afghanistan threaten the health and well-being of people in many regions of the world. Their illicit trade also adversely impacts governance, security, stability and development in Afghanistan, in its neighbors, in the broader region and beyond. This report, the second such report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime research project on the topic, covers worldwide flows of Afghan opiates, as well as trafficking in precursor chemicals used to turn opium into heroin. By providing a better understanding of the global impact of Afghan opiates, this report can help the international community identify vulnerabilities and possible countermeasures. This report presents data on the distribution of trafficking flows for Afghan opiates and their health impact throughout the world. A worrying development that requires international attention is the increasing use of Africa as a way station for Afghan heroin shipments to Europe, North America and Oceania. This is fuelling heroin consumption in Africa, a region generally ill-equipped to provide treatment to drug users and to fight off the corrupting effects of drug money. Another new trend is the growing use of sea and air transport to move Afghan heroin around the world, as well as to smuggle chemicals used in heroin production into Afghanistan. Traffickers in Afghan heroin have traditionally relied on overland routes, and law enforcement services will need to respond to this new threat. The findings of this report identify areas that need more attention. Strengthening border controls at the most vulnerable points, such as along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan's Baluchistan province, could help stem the largest flows of heroin, opium and precursor chemicals. Increasing the capacity to monitor and search shipping containers in airports, seaports and dry ports at key transit points and in destination countries could improve interdiction rates. Building capacity and fostering intelligence sharing between ports and law enforcement authorities in key countries and regions would help step up interdiction of both opiates and precursor chemicals. Addressing Afghan opium and insecurity will help the entire region, with ripple effects that spread much farther. Enhancing security, the rule of law and rural development are all necessary to achieve sustainable results in reducing poppy cultivation and poverty in Afghanistan. This will benefit the Afghan people, the wider region and the international community as a whole. But addressing the supply side and trafficking is not enough. We need a balanced approach that gives equal weight to counteracting demand for opiates.
Download or read book Counternarcotics written by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counternarcotics : lessons from the U.S. experience in Afghanistan.
Download or read book Poppy written by Gregor Salmon and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life, Death and Addiction Inside Afghanistan’s Opium Trade The farmer’s survival. The Taliban’s fight. The warlord’s power. Democracy’s ruin. Afghanistan has become the world's largest producer of opium and its offshoot, heroin - all under the noses of Western civil and military stakeholders. At the nexus of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, truth is as elusive and fragile as the new democracy itself, now on the brink of being consumed by an expanding mire of chaos. Stranger in a strange land, Gregor Salmon entered the war-torn country alone and spent eight months investigating Afghanistan's dependence on poppy. Who depends on poppy profits? And who pays the ultimate cost? Along the way he encountered Afghans whose lives were intimately tied to the trade: farmers, harvesters, eradicators, smugglers, police, doctors, addicts, warlords, gun-runners, politicians - even a pop-song loving Taliban commander. The result is a tense, fascinating and deeply moving journey along the narcotics trail, and a story about keeping your sanity in a senseless world.
Download or read book Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan written by United States. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and undermines the Afghan state's legitimacy by stoking corruption, sustaining criminal networks, and providing significant financial support to the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Despite spending over $7 billion to combat opium poppy cultivation and to develop the Afghan government's counternarcotics capacity, opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan hit an all-time high in 2013. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan farmers grew an unprecedented 209,000 hectares of opium poppy in 2013, surpassing the previous peak of 193,000 hectares in 2007. With deteriorating security in many parts of rural Afghanistan and low levels of eradication of poppy fields, further increases in cultivation are likely in 2014. As of June 30, 2014, the United States has spent approximately $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan. Despite the significant financial expenditure, opium poppy cultivation has far exceeded previous records. In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the U.S. government and coalition partners, which has led to a temporary decline in levels of opium production. However, the recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts.
Download or read book Opium Season written by Joel Hafvenstein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book OPIUM AND AFGHANISTAN REASSESSING U S COUNTERNARCOTICS STRATEGY written by John A. Glaze and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Opium Economy in Afghanistan written by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The present study goes beyond reporting on a single year's production and value. It examines Afghanistan's opium economy in order to understand its dynamics, the reasons for its success, its beneficiaries and victims, and the problems it has caused domestically and abroad.”-- Executive summary.
Download or read book A State Built on Sand written by David Mansfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscillations in opium poppy production in Afghanistan have long been associated with how the state was perceived, such as after the Taliban imposed a cultivation ban in 2000-1. The international community's subsequent attempts to regulate opium poppy became intimately linked with its own state-building project, and rising levels of cultivation were cited as evidence of failure by those international donors who spearheaded development in poppy-growing provinces like Helmand, Nangarhar and Kandahar. Mansfield's book examines why drug control - particularly opium bans - have been imposed in Afghanistan; he documents the actors involved; and he scrutinizes how prohibition served divergent and competing interests. Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork in rural areas, he explains how these bans affected farming communities, and how prohibition endured in some areas while in others opium production bans undermined livelihoods and destabilized the political order, fuelling violence and rural rebellion. Above all this book challenges how we have come to understand political power in rural Afghanistan. Far from being the passive recipients of violence by state and non-state actors, Mansfield highlights the role that rural communities have played in shaping the political terrain, including establishing the conditions under which they could persist with opium production.
Download or read book Opium and Afghanistan written by John A. Glaze and published by Strategic Studies Institute U. S. Army War College. This book was released on 2007 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Seeds of Terror written by Gretchen Peters and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the astonishing story of how Afghanistan's booming opium trade is bankrolling Al Qaeda and the Taliban, "Seeds of Terror" follows the drugs from the fields of the small farmers to the clandestine deals of the weapons merchants.
Download or read book Poppies Politics and Power written by James Tharin Bradford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
Download or read book Reducing the Cultivation of Opium Poppies in Southern Afghanistan written by Victoria A. Greenfield and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This report identifies a broad range of factors that drive opium poppy cultivation in southern Afghanistan, the locus of opium production in that country, and assesses the positive and negative effects of programs designed to promote rural development, eradicate opium poppies, or otherwise create incentives for farmers to reduce the cultivation of opium poppies. The authors consider the decision to cultivate opium poppy or other crops from the perspective of farmers who must balance concerns about household income and food sufficiency in the context of socio-economic and environmental factors that, for example, relate to security, eradication, and environmental risks; governance and religiosity; landholding terms and conditions; household circumstances; and agricultural input costs and commodity prices. A factor might encourage or discourage opium poppy cultivation and, in some instances, it could have indeterminate or conflicting effects. Then, the authors examine how rural development, crop eradication, and other programs touch on the factors --and affect poppy cultivation--through mechanisms that include subsidies on fertilizer, high-quality wheat seed, saplings and vines, and farm equipment and facilities; infrastructure investment; training; introduction of non-traditional crops; cash-for-work programs; improved market links; and non-agricultural rural income. On the basis of the assessment, the authors also provide advice on how to design programs that might better serve to reduce the cultivation of opium poppies in southern Afghanistan over the long term"--Abstract.
