Saturday, May 26, 2012

Afghanistan

Afghanistan Approves Qatar Office For Taliban

A group of former Taliban militants receive clothes and copies of the Koran as they surrender their weapons during a reconciliation ceremony in Helmand late last year.

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January 04, 2012

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that his country supports the Taliban's decision to open a political office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar to facilitate peace negotiations.

Karzai's office said in a statement on January 4 that Afghanistan "agrees with negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, which will lead to the establishment of an office in Qatar."

Karzai's statement comes a day after U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. would back the deal if it led to a negotiated end to the Afghan war.

Nuland's comments were made in response to an announcement by the Afghan Taliban on January 4 that it had reached a preliminary agreement to set up a political office in Qatar, and asked for the release of prisoners held in the U.S. military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

The Taliban office is seen by Western and Afghan officials as a crucial step toward the goal of reaching a negotiated end to a decade of war in Afghanistan.

Reuters

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by: Chechen

January 04, 2012 20:43

Yep, back then Taliban eliminated drug production in Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and the CIA couln't allow that. How could those primitive farmers disrupt the great instrument against their arch-enemy Russia. INVASION Tim Osman aka Osama Bin Laden came in handy. Now more ruskies are dying from poppy than in wars.

"in July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the United Nations to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91% from the previous year's estimate of 82,172 hectares. The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this area, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.[14]"

"The CIA supported various Afghan rebel commanders, such as Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were fighting against the government of Afghanistan and the forces of the Soviet Union which were its supporters.[5] Historian Alfred W. McCoy stated that:[6]
"In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking ... [t]he CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability."