Thread: 7 American service members killed in Afghanistan - But the Opium Poppy's Bloom Bright

7 American service members killed in Afghanistan

By PATRICK QUINN and RAHIM FAIEZ | Associated Press – 47 mins ago

Associated Press/Rahmat Gul - Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, May 4, 2013. Karzai says the director of the CIA assured him that regular funding his government receives from the agency will not be cut off. He says Afghanistan has been receiving such funding for more than 10 years and expressed hope at a Saturday news conference that it will not stop.(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Seven U.S. service members were killed on Saturday in one of the deadliest days for Americans in Afghanistan in recent months, as the Taliban continued attacks against foreign troops as part of their spring offensive.

The renewed violence came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged at a news conference that regular payments his government has received from the CIA for more than a decade would continue. Karzai also said that talks on a U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement to govern future American military presence in the country had been delayed because of conditions the Afghans were placing on the deal.

The U.S.-led coalition reported that five international troops were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, and coalition spokesman Capt. Luca Carniel confirmed that all five were American.

The coalition did not disclose the location of the roadside bombing. However, Javeed Faisal, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, said the coalition patrol hit the bomb in the Maiwand district of the province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban.

Later, the coalition reported that a soldier with the Afghan National Army turned his weapon on coalition troops in the west, killing two in the most recent of so-called insider attacks. Such attacks by members of the Afghan security forces against their fellow colleagues or international troops have eroded confidence in the Afghan forces as they work to take over from foreign forces.

Both killed were American, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the nationalities ahead of an official announcement.
It was the fourth time since last summer that seven Americans have been killed on a single day in the war.

On March 12, a Black Hawk helicopter crashed outside Kandahar, killing five U.S. troops. Two more U.S. troops were killed that day by an insider attack.

And on April 6, Afghan militants killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor in a pair of attacks in southern Afghanistan. The three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while traveling to donate books to a school. A seventh American, a civilian, was killed in a separate insurgent attack in the east.

On Aug. 16, 2012, seven American service members were killed in two attacks in Kandahar province. Six were killed when their helicopter was shot down by insurgents and one soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion.

At the news conference, Karzai said he had met earlier in the day with the Kabul station chief of the CIA and was reassured that the agency's payments to the Afghan government would continue. The New York Times had reported that for more than a decade, the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.

Karzai said he told the station chief: "'Because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it. We want to continue this sort of assistance.' And he promised that they are not going to cut this money."

Karzai described the payments as a form of "government-to-government" assistance, and while he wouldn't say how much the CIA gave to the National Directorate of Security, which is the Afghan intelligence service, he said the financial help was very useful. He claimed that much of the money was used to care for wounded employees of the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, and operational expenses.

"We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems," Karzai said.

He said the CIA payments were made in cash and that "all the money which we have spent, receipts have been sent back to the intelligence service of the United States monthly."
The CIA declined to comment on Saturday.

During the news conference at the presidential palace, Karzai also discussed ongoing negotiations on a U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement. He said talks had been delayed because of certain conditions that Afghanistan was insisting be included in the pact, which will govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.

President Barack Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.

Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.

The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.

It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan's borders against attack.

http://news.yahoo.com/7-american-mem...191327919.html

Production of Opium by Afghans Is Up Again

Abdul Khaleq/Associated Press
Farmers harvested a poppy field in the village of Bawri. Afghanistan’s opium cultivation increased for the third year in a row, according to a United Nations report.

By ROD NORDLAND
Published: April 15, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — For the third year in a row, opium cultivation has increased across Afghanistan, erasing earlier drops stemming from a decade-long international and Afghan government effort to combat the drug trade, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.

Noorullah Shirzada/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An Afghan farmer in his poppy field this month in the Khogyani district of eastern Nangarhar province.

The report’s findings raised concerns among international law enforcement officials that if the trend continued, opium would be the country’s major economic activity after foreign military forces depart in 2014, leading to the specter of what one official referred to as “the world’s first true narco-state.”

Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and last year accounted for 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. “The assumption is it will reach again to 90 percent this year,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations’ top counternarcotics official here.

The report, the Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment 2013, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and based on extensive surveys, found that opium cultivation had increased in 12 of the country’s 34 provinces. Herat, in western Afghanistan, is the only province in which cultivation is expected to decrease, the report said.

The report suggests that Taliban insurgents took advantage of insecurity in several provinces to assist opium farmers and win popular support — protecting an important form of income for their operations. Opium cultivation has increased the most wherever there has been insecurity.

Over all, the number of acres devoted this year to opium poppy cultivation is expected to top the figure in 2008, when poppy plantings reached a peak of 388,000 acres, Mr. Lemahieu said. After 2008, eradication efforts, as well as a cash incentive program for provinces that eradicated all opium poppy crops, helped reduce cultivation drastically through 2010.

This year three provinces — Balkh, Faryab and Takhar in the north and west — are in danger of losing their poppy-free status, according to the United Nations report. They are among 16 provinces that had been declared poppy-free; such provinces receive $1 million awards from the American Embassy, paid directly to the governor’s office.

In February, the State Department announced that it was handing out $18.2 million in Good Performers Initiative Awards for reducing poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. A spokesman for the American Embassy emphasized that the awards were meant to be incentives for provinces to remain poppy-free.

Opium production has become particularly high in Helmand Province in the south, the country’s major opium-producing area, and in Kandahar Province. In both places, the surge of American troops helped to beat back Taliban influence, but as those troops returned home last year, cultivation increased sharply. More than 70 percent of opium production now takes place in three provinces where the surge occurred.

“This country is on its way to becoming the world’s first true narco-state,” said one international law enforcement official, who did not want to be quoted criticizing the Afghan government. “The opium trade is a much bigger part of the economy already than narcotics ever were in Bolivia or Colombia.”

But Mirwais Yasini, a former head of counternarcotics for the Afghan government and now a prominent member of Parliament, said, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But if it goes on like this in the future, I am worried about that happening,” he said.

Mr. Yasini said eradication efforts had been countered by insecurity, compounded by corruption at local, provincial and national levels. “I don’t see anything tangible that has been done,” he said. “There is no meaningful crop substitution and no effective enforcement.”

The United Nations has estimated in the past that opium trafficking makes up 15 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, a figure that is expected to rise as international military and development spending declines with the NATO withdrawal at the end of 2014.

The mining sector, the other big hope of economic self-sufficiency for Afghanistan, is still moribund as the Afghan Parliament continues to bicker over a mining law. A lack of security and legal clarity has also prevented the large-scale exploitation of mineral resources.

The increase in opium poppy cultivation is attributed mainly to historically high prices for opium, coupled with insecurity. Prices began rising in 2010 when a poppy blight severely reduced crop yields, but they have remained high since. Farmers earn as much as $203 a kilogram for harvested opium, compared with only 43 cents a kilogram for wheat or $1.25 for rice, according to the report.

Mr. Lemahieu praised the efforts of the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics, but said international donors had greatly underfinanced critical programs to combat trafficking, with only $300,000 of a requested $11 million pledged this year.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 15, 2013
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the proportion of Afghanistan’s opium production that comes from three provinces where the “surge” of extra American troops were deployed to beat back the Taliban. It is more than 70 percent, not more than one-third.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 16, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Production Of Opium By Afghans Is Up Again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/wo...year.html?_r=0

no one else see's the correlation between Afghanistan and our Southern Border

The Same People Control Both

http://www.alipac.us/f19/what-our-ch...nistan-258351/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/us-military...nistan-270499/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/cia-drug-sm...tter-p-258317/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/did-mexican...-trade-261623/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/real-lords-...n-hubs-258027/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/romney%92s-...-video-265802/

04 May 2013 - 20H10

Two NATO soldiers killed in Afghan 'insider attack'

Two Afghan children watch US soldiers on patrol in Genrandai village at Panjwai district, Kandahar on September 24, 2012. An Afghan soldier shot dead two soldiers serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force on Saturday, officials said, in the latest "insider attack" to target the coalition.

AFP - An Afghan soldier shot dead two soldiers serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force on Saturday, officials said, in the latest "insider attack" to target the coalition.

"Two International Security Assistance Force service members were killed when an Afghan National Army soldier turned his weapon against ISAF service members in western Afghanistan today," ISAF said in a statement.

In line with coalition policy, it did not disclose the nationalities of those who died.

Also on Saturday, a roadside bomb killed five US troops in southern Afghanistan.

"Five American soldiers were killed at about noon when their armoured vehicle hit a powerful roadside mine in Maiwand district," General Abdul Razeq, Kandahar province's police chief, told AFP.

The troops died in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack, ISAF confirmed in a separate statement.

http://www.france24.com/en/20130504-...insider-attack