Newsweek - The Opium Brides of Afghanistan
Newsweek - The Opium Brides of Afghanistan
Quote:
Khalida's father says she's 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter," says Shah.
The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. "It's my fate," the child says.
Afghans disparagingly call them "loan brides"—daughters given in marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice began with the dowry a bridegroom's family traditionally pays to the bride's father in tribal Pashtun society. These days the amount ranges from $3,000 or so in poorer places like Laghman and Nangarhar to $8,000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan's No. 1 opium-growing province. For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation—but at a cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on the honor of the bride and her family. It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently told the nation: "I call on the people [not to] give their daughters for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages."
You can try it again, may be easier on
the bod -- if not now, soon; LINK.
The economics of poppies...
From yesterday's BBC
Quote:
Afghan police working with British special forces have uncovered a drugs stash of 237 tonnes of hashish.
Afghan and British officials say they believe it to be the world's biggest seizure of drugs in terms of weight.
Quote:
Afghan and British officials said the hashish had a value of more than $400m (£203m).
1 Attachment(s)
UN 2008 World Drug Report
You can download the full report here:
UN 2008 World Drug Report
Here is the relevant chart on Afghanistan. There is but a single negative production figure, that of farm price for dry opium suggesting that higher production has driven down price.
Education is a wonderful thing...
Reads like he's getting one.
He says in summation:
Quote:
"1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.
2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.
3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.
4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.
5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.
There are other initiatives that could help as well: better engagement of Afghanistan’s neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction programs. But if we — the Afghans and the U.S. — do just the five items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban."
to which I suggest:
1. That's not laughable but it is sad. Extremely unlikely to happen for several reasons and if it does, the blowback will be horrendous. Welcome to South Asia...
2. That can be done. Well, could be done. But. Since the Pentagon, that bastion of evil, is aware of what that will mean to their troops, they'll resist it. If a politician gives the order, it might happen -- and said politician would not be the one who took the flak over the sudden increase in casualties, the folks in the Five Sided bit of Arlington County know that, ergo...
3. That has some merit as long as realistic expectations are maintained.
4. Ditto the comment above.
5. Unlikely to happen, if asked, most will steer clear of any 'help' for the same reasons they have avoided helping in the past. Put too much pressure on them -- and, well, many would be happy to leave Afghanistan anyway...
The other suggestions are also good and achievable but any dream of bringing the rule of law to Afghanistan in less than a generation or two is I believe regrettably deluded. I know we're American and we like to fix things and do it quickly; but some things and some places just won't play along.
I'm sure he's a great guy and a competent
law enforcement type, he's obviously smart and aggressive. And he's an American. I think that latter fact gets in the way of the former attributes. We like to get things done, believe that wrongs must be righted and are generally pretty up-front in our dealings. Not popular attitudes in much of the world and we always have difficulty accepting that fact. Egos again... :wry:
I also think his experience with Colombia probably clouded the issue. Afghans are NOT Colombians :eek: