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The group’s ban on poppy farming has reportedly slashed Afghanistan’s opioid manufacturing by 80% in a single yr
The Taliban has reportedly achieved in a single yr what America’s “struggle on medication” failed to tug off in 5 many years: eliminating the overwhelming majority of Afghanistan’s opium output.
For the reason that Taliban banned poppy farming nationwide in April 2022, Afghanistan has carried out “probably the most profitable counter-narcotics effort in human historical past,” the UK Telegraph newspaper reported on Saturday. Afghan poppy manufacturing has dropped by an estimated 80% previously yr, the report mentioned. Poppy cultivation has plunged by greater than 99%, to round 2,500 acres, in Helmand province, which British troops occupied for a lot of the 20-year, US-led struggle in Afghanistan.
The Telegraph famous that no such provide reductions have been achieved throughout Washington’s 50-year struggle on medication, together with 20 years of US presence in Afghanistan. The Central Asian nation traditionally accounts for greater than 80% of world opium manufacturing and 95% of European opioid provides. The United Nations, amongst different observers, has raised concern that the ensuing shortfall might result in extra use of artificial opioids, comparable to fentanyl, that are doubtlessly much more harmful than heroin.
With the US answerable for Afghanistan in 2004, the Washington-backed authorities in Kabul set a objective of eliminating poppy cultivation inside 10 years. As an alternative, cultivation and output truly rose throughout the US occupation, at the same time as American taxpayers reportedly spent a minimum of $9 billion to eradicate the trade.
The US Central Intelligence Company (CIA) has a protracted historical past of involvement within the narcotics commerce. A US State Division report in 1991 discovered that covert CIA operations in Afghanistan had reworked the area from a “self-contained opium zone into a serious provider of heroin for the world market.”
However, US media shops pointed fingers on the Taliban for allegedly permitting opium manufacturing to rise after the Islamist group retook management of Afghanistan in August 2021. As an example, US state-funded Radio Free Europe claimed as just lately as Might 2023 that Afghan poppy cultivation had jumped as a result of the Taliban authorities was unwilling to implement its ban on the crop.
Mockingly, the US authorities’s United States Institute of Peace faulted the Taliban final month for being too profitable in slashing opium output. “The temptation to view the present ban in an excessively optimistic gentle — as an necessary world counter-narcotics victory — have to be averted,” the institute claimed. “That is significantly true given the state of Afghanistan’s economic system and the nation’s humanitarian state of affairs. Certainly, the ban imposes large financial and humanitarian prices on Afghans and it’s prone to additional stimulate an outflow of refugees.”
(RT.com)
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