BBC Hysterical that Taliban Destroyed Their Poppy (Opium) Crops in Afghanistan
BBC Hysterical that Taliban Destroyed Their Poppy Crops in Afghanistan
June 18, 2023 (EIRNS)—The BBC has indirectly exposed the fact that the U.S.-British occupation of Afghanistan was used to vastly expand the country’s output of opium, while hysterically denouncing the Taliban’s near-abolition of that opium production over the past year. What should be received as wonderful news for mankind—the elimination of 80% of the world’s opium supply—is instead denounced as an attack on the poor Afghan farmers, who now must grow “unprofitable” wheat rather than poppy. The fact that the farmers never received any significant portion of the billions of dollars from the heroin trade, which went to sustain the banks in the City of London and Wall Street, is not mentioned in the BBC coverage, nor that the people are starving and need food, not drugs.
BBC reporters were allowed to accompany the Taliban team deployed to eliminate poppy fields, and explain in words and pictures the Taliban team destroying the crops, even showing a farmer who is now growing wheat. They write: “In April 2022, Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed that cultivation of the poppy—from which opium, the key ingredient for the drug heroin can be extracted—was prohibited. Anyone violating the ban would have their field destroyed and be penalized according to Sharia law…. Less-profitable wheat crops have supplanted poppies in fields—and many farmers are saying they are suffering financially.”
With crocodile tears, BBC quotes a woman whose opium field is being razed: “You’re destroying my field, God destroy your home.” BBC writes: “Helmand province in the southwest used to be Afghanistan’s opium heartland, producing more than half of the country’s opium…. Last year when we were in the province, we saw swathes of land covered with poppy fields. This time we can’t spot a single field of the crop.” BBC’s closest call to admitting British open support for the drug production, is this: “Helmand was where U.K. troops had a base and where they fought some of their fiercest battles.”
Of another farmer, the agency reports: “This is the first time in his life that he doesn’t fear being hit by a bomb when venturing out. But for a people already battered by a long war, the opium ban has struck a crushing blow, coming as it does amid an economic collapse which has caused near universal poverty in Afghanistan. Two-thirds of the population don’t know where their next meal will come from.” No mention, of course, of the sanctions imposed on them from the U.S. and the U.K., nor their theft of Afghanistan Central Bank’s reserves of $9.5 billion.
The BBC confronted the Taliban spokesman about the issue, who told them: “We know that people are very poor and they are suffering. But opium’s harm outweighed its benefits. Four million of our people from a population of 37 million were suffering from drug addiction. That is a big number. As far as alternative sources of livelihood go, we want the international community to help Afghans who are facing losses…. Opium isn’t just harming Afghanistan, the whole world is affected by it. If the world is saved from this big evil then it is only fair that Afghan people receive help in return.”
The BBC briefly notes that the Taliban had largely eliminated the poppy crop in the year 2000, before the foreign invasion, without adding that the invading forces restored the drug trade while claiming to be trying to fight it. Readers of EIR know that Pino Arlacchi, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime at the time, had organized the crop substitution program with the Taliban which achieved that result.
