Helmand Province: World’s Leading Opium Producer

Opium Series

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Helmand Province is about the size of West Virginia. If it were a separate country, it would the world’s leading opium producer, with the rest of Afghanistan in second place. It’s also where links between the Taliban and the opium trade are strongest.

Poppy cultivation has been increasingly concentrated in southern provinces where the insurgency holds sway, but command and control of the southern Afghanistan drug trade is mainly located in Pakistan. Opium is processed into morphine base or heroin in unstable border areas. Profits from the southern drug trade are laundered between Quetta and Dubai, often ending up in western banking institutions.

Major campaigns to wean Helmand’s farmers off of poppy have been expensive failures. Helmand receives more U.S. aid than any other Afghan province. Much of the money is being spent on large infrastructure projects. More that $200 million in U.S. and British funding was designated for Helmand in 2008, a year when poppy output there still increased by 45 percent.

In 2008, Afghanistan produced about twice the amount of opium that the world’s addicts smoke, eat, or shoot for several years now. So where is all that extra dope? UN official s estimate the Taliban and the smugglers they work with have stockpiled as much as 8,000 tons of opium – enough to supply the world’s heroin addicts for two years.

Afghanistan suicide blasts 'kill 18' in Herat, Helmand

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17660785

10 Apr 2012

In the first Helmand attack, four policemen were killed when three suicide bombers attacked a police compound in Musa Qala district. Two of them detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies, while a third attacker was shot by police. Helmand police and intelligence officials told the BBC that the Taliban were attacking the security forces after failing to fulfill a promise to help local farmers prevent a poppy eradication program currently under way in the province. Helmand is one of the most volatile provinces of Afghanistan, frequently witnessing attacks by insurgents.

US opens 'major Afghan offensive'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8129789.stm

02 Jul 2009

The US army says it has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in south Afghanistan's Helmand province. The US military says about 4,000 marines as well as 650 Afghan troops are involved, supported by Nato planes. It is the first such large-scale operation since US President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, as part of a new strategy for winning the conflict. Many of them are being redeployed from operations in Iraq, to help with training Afghan security forces and to tackle the insurgency.

The operation - codenamed Khanjar or Strike of the Sword - began when units moved into the Helmand river valley in the early hours of Thursday. Helicopters and heavy transport vehicles carried out the advance, with Nato planes providing air cover. UK-led forces in Helmand launched their own operation to combat the Taliban insurgency last week, in what the Ministry of Defense described as one of the largest air operations in modern times. Thousands of British forces under Nato command have been fighting the Taliban in Helmand since 2006.

Zinn: Class System

Howard Zinn – Excerpts

In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbagemen and firemen. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system fails.

One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.

Photograph: Jimmy Sime, 1937, Toffs and Toughs

The Constitution as an Economic Document

Constitution Series

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard, 1913, Edited Excerpts

The primary objective of government is making rules which determine the property relations of members of society. The law is concerned with the property relations of men and the processes by which the ownership of property passes from one person to another. Different degrees and kinds of property inevitably exist in modern society; class and group divisions based on property lie at the basis of modern government; and politics and constitutional law is inevitably a reflex of these contending interests.

The concept of the Constitution as a piece of abstract legislation reflecting no group interests and recognizing no economic antagonisms is entirely false. It was an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake. Nationalism was created by a wielding of economic interests that cut through state boundaries. The southern planter was as much concerned in maintaining order against slave revolts as the creditor in putting down desperate debtors.

The Constitution is essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities. The Constitution was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope. The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system.

The opposition to the Constitution almost uniformly came from non-slaveholding farmers and from debtors.  No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the Constitution. A large property-less mass was, under prevailing suffrage qualifications, excluded at the outset from participation in the work of framing the Constitution. It is pretty conclusive that the Constitution was not the product of “we the people,” but of a group of economic interests which expected beneficial results from its adoption.

 Bush's State of the Union Address January 2008

The strength -- the secret of our strength, the miracle of America, is that our greatness lies not in our government, but in the spirit and determination of our people. (Applause.) When the Federal Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, our nation was bound by the Articles of Confederation, which began with the words, "We the undersigned delegates." When Gouverneur Morris was asked to draft a preamble to our new Constitution, he offered an important revision and opened with words that changed the course of our nation and the history of the world: "We the people."

Franklin D. Roosevelt on Privileged Enterprise

Wealth Gap Series

Acceptance Speech for the Re-nomination for the Presidency, Excerpts

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15314

27 Jun 1936

The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization. Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise. The political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives.

Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for.