Blair's latest expedition is a Lawrence of Arabia fantasy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1699144,00.html
The occupation of Afghanistan served only to turn the Taliban from
opponents to supporters of the opium trade
Simon Jenkins
Wednesday February 1, 2006
The Guardian
At last, the war on terror meets the war on drugs. The British
government has Osama bin Laden in the same frame as an 11-year-old girl
on a Glasgow street. Politics is truly holistic.
Yesterday's London conference on Afghanistan purported to search for a
"five-year plan" for the country. Such a search has only one
destination, opium. This is not some minor byproduct of the great war
on militant Islam. Opium constitutes over a third of Afghanistan's
gross domestic product and virtually all its recordable exports.
Everyone is involved in the business, from warlords to the resurgent
Taliban to members of Hamid Karzai's government. Since the US and
Britain seized the country in 2001, 87% of world trade in opium is
ascribed to Afghanistan, mostly consumed by western economies.
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