You must note that this story is from February 16, 2001 in the Eugene-Register Guardian. Prior to 9/11, the United Nations reported that the Taliban had essentially wiped out the Afghan poppy crops.U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.
A mere seven (7) months later, 9/11 occurred and the United States was at war with the Taliban over its harboring of Osama bin Laden placing thousands of our troops on the ground. Despite the Taliban's offer to turn over bin Laden if the United States provided proof, the offer was refused.
Five years later in September, 2006, there were approximately 20,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and yet the opium harvest was at a record level!
Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.
He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001.
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