Excellent CBC documentary on Afghanistan

[tex-wyo-dem]

What I would consider a "must see" since our military focus is now shifting from our illegal boondoggle in Iraq back to Afghanistan. Documentary displays just how incredibly difficult the situation is from a diplomatic and military perspective. One can see why the region has historically broken the backs of empires.

AFGHANISTAN, BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR

http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/afghanistan/video.html

[knowbody0]

1. poppy fields fund the terrorists

since our invasion, crops have doubled and doubled again.

I can see my own car and garbage cans with google earth. My question, why don't they torch the opium fields? How hard would it be to spot them and destroy them?

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. the poppy fields also fund a lot of our friends and allies and people very close to President Karzai

as much, if not more so than they fund the Taliban and their allies.

Karzai 'impeding Afghan drug war'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7523285.stm

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is obstructing efforts to tackle his country's drugs problem, a former US counter-narcotics official has said.

Thomas Schweich said Mr Karzai had protected drug lords for political reasons and tolerated "a certain level of corruption" rather than lose power.

He said the former attorney general had told him the president had prevented the prosecution of some 20 officials.

Mr Karzai has denied the claims, saying his government had cut drug production.

"Nobody has done as well as us in the last seven years in the field of counter-narcotics," he told reporters.

The president said his government had eradicated or greatly reduced drug production in more than half of the country's provinces.


But Mr Schweich, who until June was the US state department's co-ordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan, said such claims "ignore reality".

"The poppy cultivation right now is up and around 200,000 hectares - that's the biggest narco-crop in history," he told the BBC.

"The fact that it's become concentrated in five or six provinces doesn't change the fact that you have a massive, massive opium problem."

He added: "The attorney general, who was just fired, told me he had a list of 20 corrupt officials who he was not allowed to prosecute."


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7523285.stm