Word: helmand
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...long way down from the peak of $250 a kilo in 2003. Even so, the farmers turned down subsidized wheat seed and fertilizer, believing opium would be more profitable. They were wrong. When the next crop was harvested, says Rory Donohoe, a USAID official in Lashkar Gah, Helmand's provincial capital, "some wheat farmers made more than poppy farmers." That's because opium poppy is a high-maintenance plant and costs five times as much to grow as wheat. Poppy is also expensive to harvest, requiring many laborers, who must scour each poppy pod and manually extract the opium; wheat...
...record. He left for Germany in 1989 and bounced between odd jobs in hotels and laundries; according to U.S. and German press reports, he served four years in prison for the attempted murder of his stepson. (Zahir told TIME this was a "personal issue" that had been resolved.) Some Helmand officials complain he was chosen because of his friendship with the provincial governor rather than for any leadership abilities, but NATO officials say Zahir, despite his long absence from Helmand, is a well-respected tribal elder. (See a bin Laden family photo album...
...million from the drug trade; Afghan officials put the figure far lower, from $80 million to $100 million. Even at the low estimate, says a Western counternarcotics agent, "that's still enough to fuel the insurgency for a year." Nearly all of the Taliban's drug profits came from Helmand province, and a big chunk came from Marjah...
...drug lords will be looking for a chance to return to Marjah as soon as the NATO troops move on. That opportunity may present itself this summer. As McChrystal turns his attention to other Taliban strongholds in Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, he will depend on Afghan security forces to protect Marjah. In the past, the drug lords have exploited the absence of Western troops to strike alliances with Afghan officials, getting them to play the Taliban's role of protectors of the drug trade. Khan, the farmer, has seen it happen before. "When there is no Taliban, the government...
...want to return as well. Marjah is too big a prize - for its drug revenue and its propaganda value - to give up. Unlike the drug traffickers, insurgent fighters didn't have to go very far to hide from McChrystal's troops. Abdul Rahman Jan, a tribal elder and former Helmand-province police chief, points out that "hardly a single gun was captured by the NATO forces." He believes that many of the Taliban fighters simply moved back from their quarters inside Marjah's mosques and madrasahs to stay with their families. Wherever they are, the insurgents will keep...