Vrede too wrote: ↑Fri Oct 08, 2021 9:40 pm
Strange planet.
Now in power, Taliban set sights on Afghan drug underworld
When they were in power before the Taliban nearly eradicated poppy production.
The US then facilitated poppies as a way of funding friendly warlords without direct payments, something we've done for drug producers around the world. For example, Contra cocaine helped create the crack epidemic. Afghan heroin exports soared.
The Taliban also funded their insurgency by taxing poppies.
Will heroin exports now plummet? We'll see, for now the Taliban have limited revenue options.
I didn't read the entire article, so I may have missed something.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... ick-habit/
"There is evidence of opium production in Afghanistan since at least the 18th century, scholars have said. But the industry only began to thrive after 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded, setting off a protracted period of conflict in the country that has lasted almost unbroken until the present.
Before the Taliban effectively seized power in 1996, around 59 percent of global opium production was estimated by the United Nations to be from the country. But production rose quickly under the Taliban’s auspices, drawing international criticism.
Taliban founder Mohammad Omar banned the cultivation and trade of opium in July 2000 and received a $43 million grant in U.S. counternarcotics funding. A U.N. report released the following year suggested the policy was showing signs of success.
But the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan a year later upended that. As more and more rural areas of Afghanistan fell out of government control, poppy cultivation soared. By 2004, it had surpassed the peak of the first Taliban era and would soon go on to double it. Efforts to end the industry, backed by the United States, faltered.
In classified interviews published by The Washington Post as the Afghanistan Papers, officials admitted it wasn’t just the Taliban enabling the trade."
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”