Puts a whole new meaning on wearing poppies!
Here is a taste of a story Macleans
When the question was asked about whether or not to kill the crop by spraying - this was the answer.
"This year, we'll wait and see how it goes. Next year, the 2008 season, we will consider it," said Lt.-Gen. Mohammed Daoud Daoud on the sidelines of an anti-poppy gathering in Jalalabad, the ancient and verdant capital of Nangahar province, once the heart of Afghanistan's poppy belt.
This year Nangahar was a success. Poppy cultivation stayed low amid a boom that saw Afghanistan produce 82 per cent of the world's opium, providing for 90 per cent of its heroin, according to U.S. and United Nations figures.
Opium eradication is one of the great failures of the five-year period since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. In 2000, under the Islamist Taliban government, Afghanistan produced virtually no opium.
Planting has soared since then, jumping 59 per cent this year, enough to produce 6,700 tonnes of opium that fetched around US$750 million for Afghan farmers and eventually sold for $50 billion on the street, mainly in Europe, according to a UN report.
Opium poppies have become Afghanistan's chief crop and economic mainstay even as Washington and Britain have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into eradication schemes and complex efforts to create markets for legal crops.
In the meantime, drug money nourishes the insurgency. In the opium-rich southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, Taliban commanders protect growers in return for a 30 to 40 per cent tax, which is spent to recruit fighters, experts in the region say.
BRING OUR TROOPS HOME........
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