Afghan Heroin Supply Outstrips Demand

It amazes me that the Bush administration can still spout crapolla of the highest grade in response to reality. Today it was the State Department's turn, as a spokesman addressed the abject failure of the US-led attempt to destroy poppy production in Afghanistan.

"It's bad news and we need to improve it," said Thomas Schweich, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for international narcotics. "But we don't feel it's a hopeless situation, and we don't think the overall strategy is the wrong strategy."

Schweich spoke to reporters as Western officials in Afghanistan were forecasting a possible 40 percent increase this year in land under opium poppy cultivation, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in counternarcotics efforts.

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium and heroin supply, and the drug trade has had a corrosive effect on President Hamid Karzai's struggling government.

"I'm not here to put a happy face on this situation. I'm not going to say anything is truly working," Schweich said. "What I'll say is that it's improving."

"Improving," he says.

The BBC version of the story has the details the State Dept. wouldn't admit to. The word to be used is not "improving".

Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is expected to soar by 59% this year, providing 92% of the world's supply of opium, the United Nations says.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime predicted a 6,100-tonne harvest of opium, with much of the rise coming in Taleban strongholds in the south.

Which amounts to about $2.7bn a year, a third of Afghanistan's entire economy! It also, according to an earlier version of the AP report which has now been sanitized somewhat (oh, that liberal media again!) that Afghanistan alone produces something like a third more opium than all the world's addicts managed to consume last year - which means soon there's going to be a lot more addicts. And a large portion of all that money will end up in the pockets of the Taliban and Al-Qaida. It may well turn Afghanistan into a narco-state:

The Vienna-based Office on Drugs and Crime said in its report that poppy cultivation in Helmand province alone, which has seen a sharp rise in Taleban-led attacks on international troops, had risen by 162% since last year.

Only six of the country's 34 provinces are opium-free, the report says.

Office chief Antonio Maria Costa said after presenting his report to Afghan President Hamid Karzai: "These are very alarming numbers. Afghanistan is increasingly hooked on its own drug."

Mr Costa said southern Afghanistan was showing signs of collapse.

Millions of US taxpayer's dollars have been thrown into eradication of opium poppy production in Afghanistan - something that British military commanders on the ground said was an incredibly bad idea until order and alternative means of making money could be well established. It is something they are still saying, although now they are also saying the nation is very close to utter anarchy. General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British army, said recently: “To physically eradicate [opium poppies] before all the conditions are right seems to me to be counter-productive.” But they were over-ruled by US and UK officials who wanted to tie the "war on drugs" with the "war on terror". They managed that, all right.