Senior British officials have acknowledged that foreign fighters have joined Taliban forces fighting British troops in southern Afghanistan. Until now British commanders believed that Taliban forces in the southern province of Helmand were drawn entirely from Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
"More by way of foreign fighters, jihadists, are beginning to appear," the the senior foreign ministry official said. A senior defense ministry official later posited that there were only limited signs of foreign involvement.
In the past British officials have said that foreign fighters are difficult to detect because Taliban forces try to recover their dead from the battlefield. British troops have met fierce resistance in Helmand, Afghanistan's biggest drug-producing province, since going there earlier this year as part of an expanding NATO mission.
On that note, Thomas Schweich, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics says opium cultivation in Afghanistan is expected to hit record levels this year. Western officials in Afghanistan are forecasting a possible 40 percent increase this year in land under opium poppy cultivation, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in counternarcotics efforts. Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium and heroin supply, and the drug trade has had a corrosive effect on President Hamid Karzai's struggling government.
The drug trade has a "corrupting" effect.
But, stopping the growing of poppies in the Afghan is like trying to stop the growing of corn or wheat in the U.S.
It's just not going to happen.
Papa Ray
Posted by: Papa Ray | Sep 02, 2006 at 10:58