Word: opium
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...object of the ''struggle'' meeting, attended not only by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries who had come to my house but also by the former staff of Shell. The man with the tinted spectacles was in charge. He was quite a fluent speaker. He started with the Opium War of 1840, giving a vivid description of how the invading fleet of Britain bombarded the Chinese coast. He spoke as if it were I who had led the British fleet up the Pearl River. He described Shell as a multinational firm and said that Lenin had stated that such companies...
...billion in reconstruction aid sought by the Bush Administration will go largely to building an electrical power distribution system - only 6% of Afghans now have dependable electrical power, according to Jawad - and to constructing roads. Farmers unable to move crops to market in the cities are turning to opium growing because the harvest, reduced to opium paste, then processed to morphine base or finished heroin, is relatively imperishable and highly concentrated - and the trafficking groups handle all the transportation headaches. But Afghan and U.S. officials acknowledge that Afghanistan's viability as a state depends on whether the security and infrastructure...
Though the global drug trade is heating up, expect a lighter U.S. enforcement presence on the streets. The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that opium production in Afghanistan, which not only provides 90% of the heroin consumed globally but also funds Taliban activities, rose 61% last year over 2005. Some 670 tons of heroin are expected to flood the market, and that should slash the street price of a kilo of Southwest Asian heroin, now about $90,000 in Los Angeles. Yet the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which annually loses some...
...stony soil of strife-torn Afghanistan. Since the brutal Taliban regime was toppled five years ago by Western coalition forces, the government of President Hamid Karzai, beset by warlords and Islamic militants, has struggled to maintain order and control. The country's primitive economy is dominated by illicit opium production, which by some estimates accounts for as much as one-third of GDP. About 40% of Afghans are unemployed. And last month, the World Food Program warned that millions of rural Afghans might starve this winter because a prolonged drought has devastated the wheat harvest...
...Iraq, the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan is the bare minimum - not enough to guarantee victory, but sufficient to get bogged down for years. More than half of the country's gross domestic product comes from the burgeoning opium crop, and the national government exerts little power beyond greater Kabul. There is now an average of 20 insurgent attacks daily in Afghanistan, up from five a year ago. More importantly, some of those attacks are coming from Pakistan, where the U.S. military is formally barred from hunting down foes. That makes efforts to find bin Laden, believed...