Insider: The US-led war in Afghanistan turned 18 in October, and those two decades of fighting and rebuilding appear to have yielded little progress. The counternarcotics effort there, for example, “has just been a total failure,” John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in November. Click
AFP via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Afghanistan has a drug problem from the abundant poppies that get made into opium. A group of Afghan women has found a way out of their addiction through a different crop.
Ayaz Gul VOA News October 9, 2019 ISLAMABAD – The United Nations said Wednesday recent U.S. airstrikes on alleged drug-processing facilities in Afghanistan that killed more than 30 civilians, including children, were “not lawful.” The casualties occurred last May in western Farah and adjoining Nimroz provinces where the U.S. bombed more than 60 sites, identifying
The Telegraph (UK): Afghanistan is seeing a boom in methamphetamine drug production, potentially providing a new revenue stream for the Taliban in a country already notorious for opium and heroin. The United Nations said Afghan seizures of the powerful stimulant drug had increased exponentially in the past five years and then “gone off the scale” in 2019. Click
Al Jazeera: Users describe why they are increasingly addicted to so-called tablet k pills, a drug that officials know little about. A group of well-to-do young men in their 20s get out and start discussing a new drug that has, in their words, gained popularity among young Afghans. “Hashish is nothing. Opium is nothing. All anyone
BBC News: Despite the incredible resources the American military were pouring in, Dr Mansfield and his team are now convinced that the US Air Force was using 21st century fighter jets to bomb little more than mud huts. Opium now accounts for around a third of Afghanistan’s GDP, he says. It is by far the country’s biggest
AFP: A vast field of towering white poppies sways gently in the breeze, silky petals sometimes tumbling to the ground, a visible marker of the resilience of Afghanistan’s lucrative opium trade. The sight of a seemingly endless expanse of opium-producing flowers is common across rural Afghanistan, but this farm is in the centre of government-controlled Lashkar
Time: The U.S. Sent Its Most Advanced Fighter Jets to Blow Up Cheap Opium Labs. Now It’s Canceling the Program – After hundreds of airstrikes failed to curtail the Taliban’s $200 million-a-year opium trade, the U.S. military quietly ended a yearlong campaign that targeted drug labs and networks laced around the Afghan countryside. The end of
1TV: The move is part of efforts for good governance, institutionalization of reforming public administration, facilitation of effectiveness in activities related to preparing counter-narcotics plans, policies and strategies, law enforcement, reduction of drug demand, treatment of drug addicts, promotion of narcotics alternative, implementation of laws against drug smugglers, removal of interference among government institutions and