Narco-Poetry
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Opium paste
15 September 2011
FOB Pasab, Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan
4-4 Cav, Task Force Spartan
Three 82mm rockets hit base this morning, causing two wounded, but that’s about it so far today other than some potshots off base. Well, before I could finish this short dispatch there was an IED strike with about 120 pounds of explosives. Our people are fine. During the earlier rocket strike, at least one captain did a combat roll from his bed to the floor. Such combat rolls are better done from a bottom bunk than from the top. Many of the bases are so large that your chances of getting hit are trivial, but in the tiny bases where our people are more densely packed, your chances can be much higher. FOB Pasab, where this is written, is a medium-sized base. Casualties occur on base, but not many considering the number of people.
Nearly all of the 4-4 Cav fighting occurs within a few miles of FOB Pasab. During a mission many weeks ago, the Afghan Soldiers, or maybe it was our guys, found a bowl of opium paste at a family compound. The opium has already been harvested and the poppy stalks have been cut down and are dry and hardened. Farmers gather the crunchy brown stalks into piles out in the corn, and around the family compounds. The marijuana and other plants that have replaced the poppy are lush and green still.
An Afghan Soldier piled up dried poppy stocks and plopped the silver bowl of opium paste on top.
The event was more a case of spontaneous narco-poetry than a meaningful act. (Burning the flowers’ child with the mothers’ stalks, as it were.) Though poetic, the magnitude of the five minute episode during a two day combat mission during a ten year war is difficult to understate. This fire, and a thousand like it, are only symbolic. Task Force Spartan is working to reduce the 2012 opium crop in this area by using a combination of carrot and stick, but that’s a thought for later. We’ll need to wait until 2012 to know if Task Force Spartan and their replacement are making progress against the opium down here. TF Spartan clearly is making progress against the Taliban. Nobody can miss that.
Just next door to the burned opium, our people blew up something. I have no idea what they blew up, but it was loud.
A Soldier had lugged this IED robot during the mission but it broke. Maybe he should have blown it up or burned it along with the opium. He probably wanted to.
This place is a monstrous ambush zone. The enemy likes to hide bombs anywhere you can think of, such as in the walls.
One second of inattention can mean short trip home.
Comments
May the force be with you.
First off, thanks for all your efforts. First-rate as always.
In the fifth picture (with the IED robot), is that an M-4 leaning against the wall with its muzzle in the dirt?
I hope not. For 4-4 Cav's sake.
Take care.
We've turned common crops with an open market value equivalent to corn into gold. Our long term drug policies have done a great job of creating Afghanistan in Mexico.
Looks like a SAW, not an M4
Great idea. Might bring down some costs of pain killers.
Basically, I was surprised to learn that IMF officials and the head of the UN Office of Drugs & Crime openly stated that Afghan opium/heroin revenues are being used to bail out banks in the current economic crisis.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL16Df01.html
It seems that ISAF needs to keep the main ring road in the country free and open so that the trade can continue. If you guys in theater might have heard, DynCorp lost the poppy eradication mission in late 2008.
Some estimates I've seen that track British Pound, Euro, and underground dollar value for street heroin put it at $79.2 billion per year. The Afghan opium services the European, Russian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian market demand.
Heroin in the US comes from the SEA Golden Triangle, Mexico, and Colombia. Afghanistan has dwarfed the Golden Triangle after the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989. 2007 was the world record year for production, after all our farm aid kicked in.
Quoting Pablo:
You could replace opium fields with carrots fields,only bunnies would hide in, and bowls of okra would have some color in it...
Thanks for everything you are doing. God bless
cash crop? Also ,according to this book local warlords and Taliban force these people to grow quotas of opium and the trucking companies that smuggle it thru Iran are also connected to Taliban or taxed by it. How hypocritical that Muslims may not use drugs as recreation but it is okay to grow and spread the misery and slavery of drugs to non-Muslims...this is God'd Will? Gimme a break!
It's mostly for the convenience fuel for the fire, any source of fire fodder is a valuable commodity.
I have two friends who are police officers who tell me heroin is again flooding onto the streets of the US.
Do you know what's really goin on?
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