NATO’s Afghanistan: The Champion of Drugs Production

We really have to take our hats off to NATO. This clique of arms lobbyists and defender of jobs for the boys invaded Afghanistan in 2001 on the pretext that Osama bin Laden was using the country to attack western interests. Almost a decade after the Taleban declared war on drugs production, NATO’s Afghanistan is not only the world’s largest producer of opium but now, of hashish also.

Photo: NATO’s Afghanistan: The Champion of Drugs Production

Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taleban, had stated in an interview with Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper in 1998 that the USA would invade Afghanistan because he had refused to let them build a gas pipeline across his country in exchange for 5 billion USD. He was right. The invasion came three years later after those two jets flew into the Twin Towers, that one jet crash-landed in the Pentagon, managing to avoid two lamp posts with its wings and to fail to produce a single piece of evidence either on camera or otherwise and then there was the other one that simply disintegrated without trace.

Like 200 tonnes of metal vaporised.

No, really.

And nearly ten years later, NATO’s considerable coalition has not managed to gain control of the country, the NATO-installed President, Karzai, is railing against his NATO masters because he has been accused of corruption and considers it is their fault (no really) and now we learn from the United Nations Organization that NATO’s Afghanistan, already the world’s leading supplier of opium, has now become the record-breaking producer of hashish as well.

Wow, NATO 2 world population 0. Is this why they insisted on expanding eastwards (after saying they wouldn’t) to create new markets?

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in its report Afghanistan Cannabis Survey, released on Wednesday, estimated that between 10 and 24 thousand hectares of cannabis per year are cultivated in Afghanistan. Not only is the figure shocking, worse still is the affirmation that this production takes place in half of the country’s 34 provinces.

UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa declared in the report that “the astonishing yield of the Afghan cannabis crop makes Afghanistan the world’s biggest producer of hashish, estimated at between 1,500 and 3,500 tons a year,” being 145 kg per hectare, compared with Morocco’s 40 kg. Cannabis fetches 3,900 USD in income per hectare, compared with opium’s 3,600 USD.

The UN report states that there are both cannabis and opium trading centres throughout the country.

So what exactly is NATO doing in Afghanistan, where the Taleban was supposed to surrender ten years ago and still has not, where heroin production has risen no less than 40 times in the same period and now Afghanistan’s claim to fame is world record holder of opium and cannabis production?

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY

PRAVDA.Ru