Torrentz will always love you. It’s been a tough year in the news. White supremacists are committing acts of domestic terrorism. North Korea is threatening nuclear war. Trump is president. Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State. Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan is named for the wide river that runs through its provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a low- slung city of shrubby roundabouts and glass- fronted market blocks. When I visited in April, there was an expectant atmosphere, like that of a whaling town waiting for the big ships to come in. In the bazaars, the shops were filled with dry goods, farming machinery and motorcycles. The teahouses, where a man could spend the night on the carpet for the price of his dinner, were packed with migrant laborers, or nishtgar, drawn from across the southern provinces, some coming from as far afield as Iran and Pakistan. The schools were empty; in war- torn districts, police and Taliban alike had put aside their arms. It was harvest time.
A widespread epidemic of Zika virus (ZIKV) infection was reported in 2015 in South and Central America and the Caribbean. A major concern associated with this. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service. A Penn State frat brother claims his pleas to call 911 for an unconscious pledge who died after hazing ritual were dismissed. Kordel Davis described how his fellow. Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history. With a record 2. 24,0. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar- era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia's GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1. Afghanistan today, according to U. N. How did all those poppy fields flower under the nose of one of the biggest international military and development missions of our time? The answer lies partly in the deeply cynical bargains struck by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his bid to consolidate power, and partly in the way the U. S. It's the story of how, in pursuit of the War on Terror, we lost the War on Drugs in Afghanistan by allying with many of the same people who turned the country into the world's biggest source of heroin. Nowhere is this more apparent than here in Helmand, where nearly a thousand U. S. Helmand alone accounts for almost half of Afghanistan's opium production, and police and government officials are alleged to be deeply involved in the drug trade. But the Afghan government's line is that poppy cultivation only takes place in areas controlled by the Taliban. Abdul Qayum Baqizoi, who was the provincial police chief at the time, tells me. He says that he can take me to relatively secure areas in Marjah, just outside Lashkar Gah, where poppy is being grown. His family is involved in the business, he says. And anyhow, he's free – the students have gone to work on the harvest. The next day, Hekmat and I cross the broad torrent of the Helmand River and head west, along a smooth stretch of paved road that was once a dirt track studded with roadside bombs. It's hard to imagine now, but Marjah was once the site of one of the fiercest battles of the war, when, in 2. Marines air- assaulted into the Taliban- controlled area, braving gun battles and tangles of IED traps amid the mud- walled compounds and orchards. Today, the area is peaceful, the kind of green, flat farmland where you can watch a tree scroll slowly across the horizon as you drive, or a faraway thunderhead mount. The weather is hot, and the air has the nectary scent of early summer. Marjah is crisscrossed by irrigation canals; their banks, bushy with vegetation, sprout pump hoses that shoot down like drinking straws. Half- naked kids plunge from the mud embankment into the cool brown water. A soldier in the Afghan National Army's 6th Kandak walks through a poppy field during a joint patrol with the U. S. Army's 1st Battalion, 3. Infantry Regiment near Command Outpost Pa'in Kalay on April 5th, 2. Andrew Burton/Getty. He smiles fondly. We pass a wide scar of cleared ground that had once held a Marine outpost. Nomadic tribes from around the country were resettled here, and its fields became fertile with wheat, melons, pomegranates – and, with the arrival of the wars four decades ago, opium poppies. Pulling off onto a dirt road, we thread our way between the high mud walls that enclose each family compound here and come to a stop. Hekmat's paternal uncle, Mirza Khan, wearing a robe and a neatly trimmed beard, greets us warmly. Behind him is a field of dull- green poppies, the end result of the tiny black seeds he and his family sowed back in November. Lancing is laborious and delicate work; he moves one by one to each bulb, cradling it with his left hand and drawing the blades across it in a diagonal stroke with his right. In the mornings, the nishtgar go from bulb to bulb scraping off the sticky resin with a flat blade, which they wipe into a tin can hanging around their necks. Fifteen workers can harvest a productive hectare within a week. When you consider that Helmand alone has at least 1. Over the next two days, Hekmat drives me around, visiting the poppy fields. On one three- acre plot, we find half a dozen men at work, overseen by a bent, white- bearded old farmer named Hajji Abdullah Jan. I ask him why he's not worried about getting caught in a secure, government- controlled area like Marjah. Now that foreign aid has dried up and the government's interest in punishing farmers has waned, people like Mirza Khan and Abdullah Jan followed simple economic logic: Wheat prices were too low to be profitable, so this year, all over Marjah, poppy was being planted. He returns with a polyurethane bag the size of a soccer ball and hefts it onto the carpet. He unwinds a thick rubber strap, and a sour, vegetable odor fills the room. Inside is a mass of raw opium, with a rich brown color and a moist texture, like pulped figs. It's about 1. 0 pounds, a half- acre's yield. That's about $6. 00. He shrugs, and I make a quick calculation. Ten pounds of opium can be refined into a pound of pure heroin. Cut it to 3. 0 percent purity and sell it by the gram – that's 1,5. We stare at each other for a moment, and Mirza Khan gives a chuckle. He shakes his head in amazement. A future hundred grand sitting in the living room of a guy who doesn't have plumbing, electricity or furniture. Someone between him and that junkie is clearly making a killing. From the farmers' fields at harvest time, Afghanistan's opium was beginning a journey that would span vast global webs of traffickers, corrupt officials and powerful militant groups. Back in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, I arrange an interview with a drug smuggler, who insists on meeting in a neutral location; the city is calm, but threats lie close beneath the surface, both from internecine drug- mafia disputes and the Taliban. Afghan men weed poppy fields in the Saraw Valley in Charchino District, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, January 2. Kate Geraghty/Getty. At a little teahouse on a quiet street, I'm ushered into a small back room whose walls and carpets vie in griminess, and I am introduced to a stocky middle- aged man with a skullcap and beard. I'll call him Sami. He tells me that he's from the district of Garmsir, near the Pakistani border. When war with the Soviets broke out, he fled the country, along with millions of other Afghan refugees. He grew up in a camp near the border town of Chagai, in Pakistan. After finishing 1. Garmsir to - Chagai, smuggling opium through the desert wastes. In recent years, the northern route to Russia and Europe via Tajikistan has gained importance, but the southern route through Balochistan still accounts for the largest portion of opium that leaves the country. From there, it is smuggled into Iran, and then onward to the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Africa. Most of it is destined for Western Europe. The Balochistan border area between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is one of the most remote and lawless places on Earth. Two hundred thousand square miles of desert and dune seas are broken only by spindly granitic eruptions; the ethnic Baloch and Pashtun tribes that control the area are heavily armed and have been involved in various kinds of smuggling for centuries.
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