Is
Taliban
Heroin
Worse
than
Northern
Alliance
Heroin?
11/23/01
While President Bush and other politicians have attacked the Afghan Taliban regime for promoting heroin sales to the West and used such sales as a partial justification for their war on the Taliban, they have had little to say about opium grown in areas controlled by their new-found friends, the Northern Alliance. That loose coalition of warlords and ragged armies now controls two-thirds of Afghanistan, and according to United Nation drug monitors in the region, it is conniving in the planting of new poppy fields under cover of the war. Opium growing peasants who were forced last year to destroy their crops after the Taliban banned the poppy are taking advantage of the Taliban's collapse to replant just in time for the last few weeks of the sowing season, said UN officials. "The sowing season is October and November," said Kemal Kurspahic, a spokesman for the UN Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCCP). "Many farmers are now free of Taliban control and our staff in Pakistan have received reports that some are planting. We will only know in February how many poppy fields there are when they begin to grow," he told the London Daily Telegraph. Kemal denied US and British reports that accused the Taliban of relaxing its ban on the poppies, saying instead that farmers acted out of desperation and in the absence of anyone who could stop them. Kemal added that the UN believes the bulk of the drug is being produced in Northern Alliance strongholds. He cited one area, Badakhshan, under Alliance control, which he said produced 83% of last year's crop. But while UN drug bureaucrats are calling for "a long term action plan for the post-conflict period in Afghanistan to preclude the resumption of poppy cultivation," the US and Britain have been silent on the Northern Alliance connection. Of course, they have some experience. In the 1980s, the CIA turned a blind eye to opium growing among its mujahedin allies fighting to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Among the people working with the CIA and its intermediaries, the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence agency, were both Northern Alliance commanders and Osama bin Laden. The more things change...
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