Word: opiumeators
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...ruined economy, continued banditry and the return of the opium trade, a revived Taliban is the last thing that Karzai's poor nation needs. In a speech last month on Afghanistan's Independence Day, Karzai said, "It is the duty of everybody to launch a holy war to reconstruct this nation." The Taliban has already launched a holy war of its own. Soon enough the snows will come and the summer's fighting will die down. But if the U.S. and its ally Pakistan do not crush the Taliban soon, next year promises more bloodshed. "We are waiting," says Qari...
...appears to be a spectacular comeback. Over the past week, more than 100 Afghanis have been killed in clashes between large Taliban formations and government forces. The authority of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai doesn't extend much beyond the capital; the countryside is in the hands of warlords, opium farmers and jihadis. Some 10,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan to hunt al-Qaeda and its allies, and some 5,000 NATO troops staff International Security Assistance based in the capital. That leaves the Taliban and its allies to pursue the same strategy used by their forebears against...
...Afghanistan routinely come across something they're not looking for: evidence of a thriving Afghan drug trade. But they're not doing anything about it, antinarcotics experts tell TIME. Several Kabul diplomats familiar with U.S. military operations say that while carrying out searches in eastern and southern Afghanistan--opium-growing areas that are also Taliban strongholds--U.S. soldiers have found hidden caches of narcotics, crude heroin-processing labs and convoys racing across the desert with bundles of hashish and opium, headed for Europe and Central Asia. "If these drug convoys have any connection with terrorists, special forces will move...
...move cash, guns and fugitives across borders. "I'm positive that the Taliban are heavily involved in drug trafficking," says Wais Yasini, counter-narcotics adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "How else do you account for the source of their money?" This year, after a bumper crop of opium poppies, say U.N. officials, Afghanistan became the world's largest heroin producer, with an estimated $1.2 billion in profits...
...underfunded federal agencies had been fighting a losing battle against the problem of outlawed drugs growing on public lands. Federal officials are especially concerned about public safety in California's parks and forests because heavily armed Mexican crime networks have planted vast marijuana plantations in remote areas. Did the opium farm represent a new product line--the first step in a domestic heroin-processing operation? Unlikely. As it turned out, the three men found at the scene were Asian. (No one has yet been arrested; one suspect, who had a brown substance on his hands and scratches on his face...