I’ve read that a lot of money the taliban gets is from opium farms in Afganistan that they ship across the border, eventually ending up in Europe. I have seen shows of special forces raiding these farms and the like but why not just bomb them? Are they not that big of a concern?
First of all, these are fields of poppies. What do you think bombing a field is going to accomplish? You might destroy this particular crop, but it doesn’t stop people from just growing more.
Second, there would be a lot of civilian deaths. This is a bad thing.
If you think we should eradicate the poppy crop with herbicides, well, this is in itself problematic. Put yourself into the position of a poor rural Afghan dude. You don’t have a lot of economic options. Your country has been bombed into the stone age and has been going through a civil war for your entire life. You have a grade school education and half of your family is illiterate because the Taliban wouldn’t let women go to school. You decide to grow poppies because it’s really all you’ve got going.
THEN…one day the Americans come along and drop a bunch of herbicides on your poppy fields. FUCK THOSE AMERICANS. Now, how are you going to support your family? Well, the Taliban is offering $300/month. Wow, that’s pretty freaking good. Plus, you’re really pissed off at the Americans after they destroyed your entire economic livelihood, how would THEY like it if you planted some IEDs around?
…and that is why we don’t bomb the poppy fields.
Ok I get the point that they are just hard working people trying to make a living in a hard situation now I know my answer. It just seemed like an easy way to cut off funding for the Taliban although it would just make more of the populous hate us
Sadly, there is no easy way of cutting off the Taliban’s funding source. If an easy way existed, this war wouldn’t still be going on.
There is no easy way to do anything in Afghanistan. It’s incredibly complicated.
It’s easy to f**k up there. Just do anything.
About as easy and useful as bombing pot gardens in the USA.
Doesn’t anybody ever learn anything from history?
And look how great that worked.
To the OP: your suggestion is not just ignorant, it’s horrifying.
Okay, point.
Sure there is, buy the product for more money or pay the farmer to put his fields in fallow. Better yet, turn Afghanistan into the next tulip/roses exporter (whatever flower works). The closer you can connect the farmer to the buyer the more money he will make.
Can’t disagree with that.
Taliban will find money one way or the other, whether from “charities” or from Iran or whatever. E.g. look at Iraq - no opium there, but apparently no shortage of money to keep insurgency going. Of course, now a lot of the insurgency got bought off by the government (yay! what kept them so long), but the rest keeps on chugging along.
There is currently a blight afflicting the opium crop in Afghanistan. The Afghan government and US are, of course, blamed for it.
Do remember, of course that not ALL opium poppies are used for illegal drugs.
There is a serious shortage of medical opiates in the developing world.
A better solution (although not, it has to be said a popular one) would be for governments to buy the opium crop from the farmers at market value, and purify it for use as medical morphine and diamorphine, and then sell it to the developing world at cost price to meet the needs of cancer patients, the terminally ill and those who are currently living and dying in pain.
Two birds, one stone, and all of that.
Well the Taliban banned the growing of poppies and were quite successful at making it stick.
Why did we win against the Taliban so quick. Well we really didn’t. The people just changed sides. And one of these reasons for changing sides was that many felt they could get the poppies growing again.
Paying people for growing or not growing is ineffective because all it does is drive the price up.
I make $300 year growing poppies. You pay me $400 to NOT grow them. So there is less crop on the market, the price goes up. Pay enough people the $400 NOT to grow them, then the price goes up to someone willing to pay me $401 TO GROW them again.
And then you have to pay them $402 NOT to grow them and the cycle grows.
Legal purchasing doesn’t work either. 'Cause if you pay someone $300 for his poppy crop to make legit drugs, someone will pay you $400 to give it to him for illegal drugs.
What if you burn the poppies or blow them up? As someone pointed out, so what? They’ll just grow them again. In the meantime the price goes up.
Let’s say all the opium fields get burned up. Fine so the price goes up by double. Next year I replant and get double my price and I’m back even as if the poppies were never burned in the first place.
As long as there’s a market for something, someone will take it. If the market is illegal it just drives the price up.
One of the German development agencies - I think either Welthungerhilfe, Zukunftsstiftung Landwirtschaft or Brot für die Welt - are doing just that: teaching farmers to grow roses. Because Roses require a lot of handwork, and you need a lot of roses to get the oil /fragrance for perfume and cosmetics, rose products (oil/ essence water) will pretty reliably get a high price on the world market. This means that the farmers get independent of the Taliban or other people connected with the drug market, which apparently the farmers want - they need the money because it’s difficult to grow normal food in that altitude and climate, but they don’t like the problems with growing drugs that Western nations frown on.
There are many efforts to try to get farmers to grow something other than poppies. The world bank has suggested planting saffron which is a high value crop grown in the region. It is not so simple to suddenly throw an economy into another gear and start producing something new (look at how large America’s military industrial complex is 2 decades after the end of the cold war). Poppies cultivation has an infrastructure, farmers know how to grow it and where to sell it.
If you paid someone to keep their fields fallow, how long are you going to keep that up? Is the US going to pay farmers to sit and do nothing until the end of time? Are we going to verify it until the end of time?
If you are to just destroy farmers’ cash crops (poppies) through air assaults, then why on earth would the US expect these farmers’ to reject the Taliban in favor of the US? Also, destroying the crop means destroying the nation. I have flown all over Afghanistan and I can tell you, poppies are everywhere; to destroy them, you will need to destroy most of the farmland in the country, then what?
Finally, heroin trafficking is big business in Afghanistan and permeates all levels of society. Pres. Karzai’s brother is one of the nation’s biggest smugglers and also reportedly works closely with the US governmen in its anti-Taliban activities, so if you can’t even get the USG to kick its heroin habit, how can you expect an impoverished nation to do so?
…by killing other people. Heroin kills people (admittedly, the kind of dummy who’d try heroin, but still…). So morally they’re on the level of anyone else who works long hard hours to kill others because it pays better.
Surely the illegal drug guys pay better than my HMO does – so anyone raising poppies because it pays better isn’t going to choose to sell them to Mr. Holding His Costs Down.
.
The Taliban succeeded in banning poppy growing using exactly the same method they use today to get farmers growing it to fund the insurgency - they brutally murder anyone who does not do what they want.
Si
That was for a completely diffrent purpose, and the crop destruction was incidental, not the main point of it.
That may be so, but surely we know every arms dealer who they might be likely to purchase from, and if we don’t, why not? How can you ever expect a cessation of hostility if you can’t even be knowledgeable about who’s selling them their weapons?