Category: General

It looks for now like it is, as the President Hamid Karzai’s hardline stance against the drug crop may be having a significant effect.

The top U.N. drug official is heading to Afghanistan to check out reports that farmers are heeding government calls for a “holy war” on the rampant drug trade by slashing opium cultivation.

Foreign and Afghan officials are forecasting a drop of between 30 percent and 70 percent in this year’s crop, as once verdant expanses of poppies are being sown with wheat instead.

In eastern Nangarhar province and southern Helmand, poppy production could be down by more than three-quarters this year, the officials said, though reliable statistics are not yet available.

The reports suggest at least an initial response to President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-sponsored campaign against the illegal Afghan narcotics industry, which last year supplied an estimated 87 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material for heroin.

[…]

Skeptics say drought, disease and falling opium prices — not Karzai’s eradication program — are responsible for the drop in cultivation.

[…]

The United Nations said that although bad weather and plant disease significantly reduced the opium yield last year, the total output was about 4,200 tons. It valued the trade at $2.8 billion, or more than 60 percent of the country’s 2003 gross domestic product, and warned that Afghanistan was turning into a “narco-state.”

Under pressure from the United States and Europe, Karzai has called for “jihad,” or holy war, against the drug industry, which is believed to benefit guerrillas, warlords and corrupt officials.

Foreign diplomats give some of the credit to Mohammed Daoud, a former militia commander and the government’s top anti-narcotics cop. Daoud, a deputy interior minister, summoned provincial police chiefs to Kabul and told them they would be fired if they didn’t halt poppy cultivation.

Daoud said in an interview he expected cultivation to fall by 50 percent to 70 percent this year.

A Western official involved in counternarcotics was more cautious, saying the decrease could be 30 percent or more.

Even worst case, this is a vast improvement. So what’s the pocketbook hit for Uncle Sam right now?

The U.S. government is paying thousands of people in Helmand and Nangarhar $3 a day to clean irrigation ditches and repair roads instead of planting poppy.

Really, just a pittance. Is it worth it, along with the continued military efforts for stability?

Farmers in two traditional growing areas of Nangarhar told an AP reporter they stopped planting poppies because they were told to by powerful local landowners and security officials.

“It was good business, but they said we should stop, and wait and see,” said Abdul Wahid, a bearded sharecropper resting under a stand of mulberry trees next to his fields.

“If we get help, maybe it’s gone for good. If not, we’ll plant again.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Ah, missed opportunities.

Twenty-three terror suspects tried to hang or strangle themselves at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay during a mass protest in 2003, the military confirmed Monday.

The incidents came during the same year the camp suffered a rash of suicide attempts after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller took command of the prison with a mandate to get more information from prisoners accused of links to Al Qaeda or the ousted Afghan Taliban regime that sheltered it.

Between Aug. 18 and Aug. 26, the 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves with pieces of clothing and other items in their cells, demonstrating “self-injurious behavior,” the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. Ten detainees made a mass attempt on Aug. 22 alone.

U.S. Southern Command described it as “a coordinated effort to disrupt camp operations and challenge a new group of security guards from the just-completed unit rotation.”

Guantanamo officials classified two of the incidents as attempted suicides and informed reporters. But they but did not previously release information about the mass hangings and stranglings during that period.

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Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International’s office in Washington, was critical Monday of the delay in reporting the incident.

“When you have suicide attempts or so-called self-harm incidents, it shows the type of impact indefinite detention can have, but it also points to the extreme measures the Pentagon is taking to cover up things that have happened in Guantanamo,” he said.

Amnesty International and the International Red Cross should immediately conduct investigations and rapidly condemn the prisoners for torturing themselves.

Officials said Monday they differentiated between a suicide attempt in which a detainee could have died without intervention and a “gesture” they considered aimed only at getting attention.

Army Gen. Jay Hood, who succeeded Miller as the detention mission’s commander last year, has said the number of incidents has decreased since 2003, when the military set up a psychiatric ward.

In 2003, there were 350 “self-harm” incidents, including 120 “hanging gestures,” according to Lt. Col. Leon Sumpter, a spokesman for the detention mission.

Last year, there were 110 self-harm incidents, he said.

[…]

The military has reported 34 suicide attempts since the camp opened in 2002, including one prisoner going into a coma and sustaining memory loss from brain damage.

Of the 23 men who tried to hang or strangle themselves during the 2003 protest, two required hospital treatment and then were transferred to the psychiatric ward, the military statement said.

Sixteen remain at Guantanamo Bay, while seven were transferred to other countries, the statement said without giving details. Some transferred detainees have been released while others continue to be detained in their native or other countries.

The problem here is a matter of effort. Either the detainees don’t really have their hearts in it, or we’re putting too much energy into saving them from themselves.

C’mon, ya terrorist bastards, step up and take one for the team.