Why Is the Taliban Now Pushing the Opium Trade in Afghanistan When Before 9/11 They Successfully Stopped It?
Question by Ivan: Why is the Taliban now pushing the opium trade in Afghanistan when before 9/11 they successfully stopped it?
We are told that the Taliban are now promoting the cultivation and harvesting of opium poppies in Afghanistan. This seems strange when before 2001 they threatened to put a stop to the global opium/heroin industry… Doesn’t make sense.
Best answer:
Answer by pacer
They never stopped it there because with the lack of clean drinking water, or the ability to grow much else there, they can not take the chance at spraying the opium crops to eradicate them. The U.S. has offered for decades to spray the opium crops, and you can’t blame them for refusing the powerful poison in their already barren farm land.
“Afghanistan has doubled its opium production over the past two years and now accounts for 93 percent of the world’s output, according to the annual UNODC survey. The southern province of Helmand alone has become the world’s biggest source of illicit drugs. The amount of Afghan land used for opium has surpassed the total used for coca cultivation in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined. Afghan poppies, which start as flowers in farmers’ fields and often wind up as heroin on U.S. streets, fuel a $ 3 billion a year industry in Afghanistan. The industry is filling the coffers of the Taliban, the group who gave safe haven to al Qaeda before and after 9/11, and it is destabilizing the Afghan government” (CNN). This investigative report was done using the figures from 2005, since then the figures from 2006 have been released and are much higher.
After our many decades of fighting this same war on illegal drugs; it would be safer, faster and much cheaper to end this war by legalizing the drugs. The worst resistance would come from the drug cartels world-wide and the terrorist networks in the Middle-East and Mexico. Without the illegal drug industry funding the terrorists, this global war on terror could end much sooner, and our own boarders would be easier to guard. At the same time for just a few more years (not decades) the United States would still have to continue clearing up the mess by the once illegal drugs; the same way as usual, with tax-payer funded drug rehabs, including heroine or methadone babies and their lifetime medical costs etc… Our society needs to get more faith in itself because in the Middle-East where it is much easier to get heroin than it is to get clean drinking water; they are not a society of drug addicts.
This would also cut off the funded government corruption in the Middle East, Mexico, and the United States. In time this will also solve many other problems in our economy especially the cost, and availability of health care. The repercussions this would help to create for a few years (not decades) is one of the best examples of why our forefathers emphasized so strongly on the necessity of separation between the church and state. We should take one-third of the drug rehabs in the U.S. and turn them into hospice units for the “drug challenged”.
Answer by DesB3rd
For a greater part of their time in power the Taliban did little to reduce opium output and were happy with the income. However a brutal Taliban crack-down in early 2001 did indeed see cultivation of the drug reduced to insignificant levels.
The change to the current position is indeed inconsistent, hypocritical and purely pragmatic. They would, of course, say that victory over the new state is their overriding priority and in the fulfilling of this duty they may set aside secondary concerns until that is achieved.