Word: afghan
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...some it may seem as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish. The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies - the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996. Having infuriated the Obama Administration by continuing to drag his feet on corruption - and then cozying up to Iran and China when Washington turned up the heat - Karzai ratcheted up the rhetoric last week. He accused the U.S. of trying to dominate his country, blamed the West for last year...
...America's enemies, and not all of America's allies are Karzai's allies. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Pakistan, the original patron of the Taliban, which has also been going through the motions of indulging American concerns while continuing to enable the Afghan Taliban insurgency and identifying Karzai as an adversary because of his regime's close ties with India...
Worse, many believe the policies have helped stoke the Taliban's war against the coalition by uniting residents against the Afghan soldiers who destroyed their opium crops. "Eradicating marijuana and opium fields can breed resentment by people and be destabilizing," says John Dempsey, a rule-of-law adviser to U.S. and Afghan officials for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He cites the town of Marjah, in Helmand province, where U.S. forces rolled tanks over poppy fields in a major offensive in February, two years after Afghan forces destroyed the local farmers' opium crops. After those antidrug offensives, Dempsey says, "local...
Despite the new U.N. findings, Afghan and NATO forces are unlikely to start trying to eradicate the cannabis crops, in part because Western policies over the past several years aimed at eradicating Afghanistan's mammoth opium crops are widely regarded by U.S. officials as having failed miserably. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, told G-8 leaders in Italy last year that the antidrug efforts in Afghanistan "did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work." (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley...
Dempsey believes farmers could be better persuaded to give up growing opium and cannabis if Western and Afghan officials introduced big incentives and subsidies for growing food crops and helped farmers sell them. One crucial problem, he says, is that the roads in southern Afghanistan are too dangerous for farmers to drive their crops to local markets. Groups of armed drug traffickers, meanwhile, travel through the countryside, buying opium and cannabis at the farm gates for cash. For many farmers in the area, making a living and staying alive - sadly - go hand in hand...