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Thread
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What secrets lurk in the filecards?
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01-19-2010, 02:56 AM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Loose Cannon
When I was at the KGB museum, the guide had expressed how Russia was somewhat upset about the fact that some Afghans were still allowed to operate their Poppy fields. Well 90% of drugs in Russia come from Afghanistan. I know if they couldn't grow there crops they turn to the Taliban, but I bet half the Terrorists and Gun smugglers are the same drug smugglers. What's the difference.
Slightly off-topic, but I've always been a proponent of legitimising the poppy plantations in Afghanistan. What the UN, NATO, and the West-backed Karzai government are doing now, forcing poppy farmers to grow crops like wheat, belies a lack of understanding of the history of the country's indigenous agriculture and just further drives certain segments of the local population towards the side of religious and ideological extremists and anti-government forces. The fact of the matter is, cultivation of the poppy plant and the sale of products derived from it has been an ingrained part of the economy and the herbal medicine practices of the region for at least 3000 years. It's no more innocuous or dangerous to the average Afghan-on-the-street as tobacco is to your typical North American. If Western and Karzai government forces take the stance that poppy cultivation is "wrong" or "evil," is it any wonder that a lot of local Afghan farmers feel alienated and marginalised and end up supporting anti-West and anti-government sentiment?
The thing is, legal poppy cultivation is a thriving industry in Turkey, Australia, and India, where opium and its derivatives are used to make analgesics for medicinal and surgical purposes. For some reason, it's only recently that the talking heads overseeing Afghanistan have come to consider establishing a government-backed legal poppy cultivation industry in Afghanistan (the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Big Pharma companies like Bayer have a hand in the UN and NATO's anti-poppy policy, because government-subsidized analgesics made from the poppy plant will often be cheaper than the synthetic opioids peddled by Bayer and its ilk).
I can actually see Cobra doing something like that, fomenting terrorist activity in areas where poppy cultivation is part of the indigenous agriculture and encouraging local growers to affiliate themselves with religious extremists, to discourage the establishment of a legal (not to mention cheaper) alternative to the synthetic factory-produced painkillers Cobra's pharmaceutical division makes.
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