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...When my bag failed to show up, I faced yet another missed connection: to the bus I needed to catch for the two-hour ride to my final destination. So rather than wait in line at the lost-luggage counter, I took a phone number to call in the report later. Which I did - only to be told sternly that lost-baggage reports cannot be taken over the phone, only in person at the airport. (See 50 essential travel tips...
...report's figures are startling. The U.N. agency's staff, made up of expatriates and Afghans, have been monitoring the country's poppy fields on the ground and from aerial surveillance cameras and they have found that farmers this year planted far fewer poppies - an estimated drop from last year of about 79,000 acres (about 32,000 hectares), or 22% of the country's entire opium crop. Afghanistan's output usually accounts for more than 90% of the world's heroin. The price that Afghan farmers get for their opium has also crashed, dropping by a third since last...
That more efficient cultivation has hardly been addressed by the NATO campaign to eradicate opium, according to the report. U.N. officials call the military campaign "a failure," because the strategy has focused on destroying poppy fields, without offering farmers an equivalent income if they opt to grow other crops. Fewer than 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) have been eradicated - accounting for less than 4% of Afghanistan's opium crop. Despite that small result, Costa says the military campaign has made Afghanistan's farmers far more secretive, further complicating international efforts. "Before, opium stocks were in shacks and warehouses...
Still, the U.N. report says, many Afghan farmers have apparently chosen to switch out of opium. The reasons might lie in simple market factors of supply and demand. In the years immediately following the Taliban's ouster in 2001, Afghan farmers, who had languished under a temporary Taliban ban against growing poppies, produced huge bumper crops. Those were harvested just as drug users in Europe, opium's biggest market, began to shun heroin in favor of cocaine and synthetic drugs like ecstasy. "There is definitely an issue of stocks over consumption," Costa says. "Starting in about 2006 Afghanistan has been...
...religious figures, teachers, village headmen and so on [EM] the least-trusted individuals were those from the military and the police. In fact, only 18.6% of locals in the deep south fully agreed that a military solution was the right one for these three troubled provinces. An Amnesty International report released earlier this year condemned Thai security forces for using torture against detainees, not least because such violations would only stoke further radicalization among already disenchanted Muslim youth. Given the steady number of deaths that continue to convulse the region, the government's campaign to win hearts and minds hasn...