The Last Crusade

“MR. OBAMA, BOMB THE AFGHAN POPPY FIELDS!”

U.S. BLAMED FOR WORLD-WIDE HEROIN EPIDEMIC
RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT DEMANDS ACTION
by
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

Russian officials accuse United States forces in Afghanistan of “conniving with drug producers” and urge the Obama Administration to pursue aggressive aerial eradication operations against Afghanistan’s opium poppy crops.

Their pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

Despite having spent over $1 billion on counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan since 2002, including eradication efforts, the U.S. government has refused to curb the cultivation of the poppy fields and to shut down the laboratories that transform the poppy sap into choice Number Four heroin.

Presently, Afghanistan produces over 90% of the world’s supply of opium.

Moscow’s tough stance on narcotics stems from its own internal consumption levels, which have steadily reached epidemic proportions. According to 2008 records, up to 21 percent of the world’s production of illicit opiates ended up in Russia, resulting in 30,000 deaths blamed on heroin-induced overdoses annually.

“We are obviously very dissatisfied with the lack of attention from NATO and the United States to our complaints about this problem,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO, told reporters.

Mr. Rogozin blames the Obama Administration for the recent decline in the amount of poppy eradicated annually in Afghanistan. Between 2008 and 2009, only 10,000 hectares of opium poppy, or less than 4 percent of the land devoted to its cultivation, were eradicated, compared to 19,000 hectares eradicated in 2007 and 15,300 hectares in 2006.

The Russian envoy has asked the United Nations to oversee the elimination of 25 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy fields, a notion previously endorsed by the U.S. State Department but rejected by the Afghan government in 2007.

Heroin production has skyrocketed in Afghanistan since the US invasion in 2001. On July 27, 2000, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, announced his decision to ban the growing of opium poppies within the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation took an immediate nosedive.

But in recent years, thanks to the U.S., occupancy, the poppy cultivation has soared from 3,200 metric tons per year to 8,500 metric tons.

In 2005, when poppy production reached five thousand tons, Congressman Mark Steven Kirk said: “The Afghans are selling 7 to 8 billion dollars of drugs in the West a year. Bin Laden oversees the export of drugs from Afghanistan. His people are involved in growing the crops, processing, and shipping. When Americans buy drugs, they fund the jihad.”

Despite such claims, the Bush and Obama Administrations have refused to spray the poppy with mycoherbicides (not genetically engineered but taken from nature) that could destroy the crops at the meager cost of forty thousand dollars.

Some maintain that the spraying of the fields would destroy the Afghan economy, since opium production constitutes more than 60 percent of the country’s gross national product.

Others see a more sinister reason maintaining that the poppy fields fund CIA operations, known as “black ops,” including the Gulen schools which have been established throughout Central Asia.