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U.S. anti-drug money wasted in Afghanistan
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: February 7th, 2011
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-30/opinion/27091387_1_opi...
The United States continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "good governance" initiatives [in Afghanistan]. This $760 million program, to strengthen government agencies, was America's single largest nonmilitary expense in Afghanistan over the past year. All of it was money thrown away. Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development began promoting what it calls "Afghanization of aid." Well, in Afghanistan, government leaders have only one use for foreign aid. They stuff the cash into suitcases and fly it to secret bank accounts in Dubai. Afghanistan remains the world's largest grower of opium poppies. It supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin. Many thousands of its citizens are addicts. Earlier this month, the United Nations put out its annual "Afghanistan Opium Survey" and found that, even after the United States has spent more than $2 billion on drug enforcement there, "the total area under cultivation" during 2010 "and the number of families growing opium poppy, remained the same as in 2009" - but for one thing. The U.N. found "an alarming increase of 97 percent" in opium-poppy cultivation among northeastern provinces that are not traditional poppy-growing areas.
Note: For shocking stories by two award-winning journalists suggesting direct involvement by government agencies in the drug trade, click here. And for key reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.
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