What is Winning in Afghanistan

And corporate suits, in their corporate offices, are controlling the trade around the World!

Opium is winning the Afghan war

Under our eyes... opium poppy fields in Afghanistan. Photo: AP

October 31, 2010 - THE parliamentary debate on Australia's involvement in Afghanistan has involved little mention of its implications for our other big conflict, the war on drugs. In Afghanistan, the US and its allies are, once again, propping up Third World drug producers for political purposes.

According to the UN World Drug Report 2010, Afghanistan has produced 90 per cent of the world's illicit opium in recent years. A lot of that has come from the province in which Australian troops are stationed.

As for the government we support, the US reporter Gretchen Peters says in her 2009 book Seeds of Terror: "No one has much hope for the corrupt and inept administration of Hamid Karzai. The President of Afghanistan, an ethnic Pashtun, derives much of his political support from the country's Pashtun-dominated south, where he has resisted efforts to curtail poppy cultivation." {read rest}