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...there last month, they found 700 kg of raw opium and 25 kilos of heroin. Anywhere else in the world, that would have been a major drug bust, but for Marjah, it was mere crumbs. After all, when Afghan and U.S. counternarcotics agents raided the same market nearly a year ago, the haul was measured in tons, not kilos. But the Marines lacked the element of surprise; to minimize civilian casualties, U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal had warned of the offensive weeks in advance. The drug traffickers and many of their Taliban protectors had cleared out long before...
...military commanders advocate simply buying up this year's harvest and persuading farmers to grow something else next season. The counternarcotics officials strongly disagree. Paying the farmers would be tantamount to "rewarding criminality," says a Western official. He adds, "These people knew about the offensive, and they planted the crop anyway. They wanted to make a profit." These officials point out that swaths of eastern Afghanistan have been cleared of opium poppy by provincial counternarcotics teams without any farmers' revolt...
Zahir claims that Marjah is "70% under control," but he adds that at night, masked Taliban fighters appear at houses and threaten to behead people if they work with the government. The insurgents need the farmers to stick with the poppy. According to U.N. experts, last year the Taliban reaped nearly $300 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...
...Glynis' medical bills come in, the prospect of the Afterlife is dwindling along with his savings. Shep's best friend, toxic pontificator Jackson, spends his waking hours taking mental notes for an anticapitalist manifesto he'll never write, but his real problem is heartbreak over his 16-year-old daughter Flicka, who was born with a fatal genetic disease called familial dysautonomia. Flicka is angry because she is deformed, drooling and dying. (See the top 10 fiction books...
Uncertainty surrounding the upcoming general election and news that the nation's economy has further contracted have caused the British pound to decline 7.3% against the U.S. dollar this year, with most of the drop occurring within the past month. Worth almost $2 in 2008, the pound now sits just below...