Western hypocrisy on Afghanistan

"NINETY PERCENT of all heroin sold in Britain originates from Afghanistan.
Stopping that trade is directly in our interests."

"The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young
British people buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of
their regime that we should seek to destroy." (Tony Blair, speaking at Labour
Party conference October 2001 on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan.)

Last year, Afghanistan exported 87% of the world’s opium supply and
accounted for 60% of the country’s productive wealth, worth $2.8 billion. The
only year with a bigger output was in 1999, before the Taliban regime banned
its production.

So a war costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars to remove the
Taliban and hence the scourge of opium, has actually increased its production!

The US has announced a new offensive against drug production in Afghanistan
but this could prove unpopular amongst the country’s rural population and
difficult to achieve. The UN Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004 says drug
production is "the main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among
previously quarrelsome peoples". Some 2.3 million people, 10% of the
population, is involved in opium.

So, without economic alternatives and with the politically and militarily
weak stooge presidency of Hamid Karzai, the US and British governments will
struggle to eradicate the drug.

In recent weeks Tony Blair and George Bush have hailed the dubious
presidential election in Afghanistan as proof of the onset of democracy and
progress.

In reality, Afghanistan is a fractured country run by competing warlords,
engaged in repression and criminality. A country so poor that only opium
production can provide an income for many people. A state deemed by the United
Nations as the ‘second worst to live in’. That’s the ‘bright’ future for
Afghan people under capitalism.