Nederland en Afghanistan 131

Het staat er echt, ik verzin het niet. Nu eens opletten welke wakkere Nederlandse journalist dit kabinet vraagt om een reactie hierop. De NRC bericht:

'Ook in Uruzgan is de laatste dagen zware strijd geleverd. Het ministerie van Defensie in Den Haag meldt dat Talibaan-strijders een politiepost in Chora hadden ingenomen, op een moment dat veel agenten waren weggebleven van hun werk om thuis te helpen met de papaveroogst. Nederlandse militairen zijn Afghaanse troepen te hulp geschoten die probeerden de post te ontzetten. Uiteindelijk is de post met een bombardement vernietigd. Zeker twee opstandelingen zijn gedood. De operatie was vandaag nog gaande.'

Lees verder:
http://www.nrc.nl/buitenland/article704214.ece/
VS_doden_136_Talibaan_bij_strijd_in_Herat

Met andere woorden: Nederland helpt mee de heroinehandel te bevorderen.

Dit werd in 2001 bericht: 'Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.'

Lees verder: http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html

Vier jaar later, onder het door Nederland financieel, militair en politiek gesteunde bewind van de Amerikanen in Afghanistan, verscheen dit bericht:

'Lucrative opium production is flourishing in the country.

ISMAIL SAMEEM/REUTERS

Afghanistan riddled with drug ties
The involvement of local as well as high-level government officials in the opium trade is frustrating efforts to eradicate poppy fields.
By Scott Baldauf and Faye Bowers Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN; AND WASHINGTON – The case of an Afghan village police chief, named Inayatullah, is a small example of a much larger problem.
Is Commander Inayatullah a courageous law-and-order crusader responsible for smashing the drug mafia in his hamlet? Or, is he an opium smuggler? Or, as his bosses say, is he both?

Part 1 - 05/12/05 Afghanistan riddled with drug ties
Part 2 - 05/16/05 Will poppy eradication programs work?

Reporters on the Job
The Monitor gives the story behind the story.

From Internet cafe to crime scene in Kabul

It's a question that hangs over more and more public officials here. The post-Taliban boom in opium production means that drug money now permeates every stratum of Afghanistan's society - from the farmers cultivating poppies in the east to those in the highest levels of the central government of Kabul, according to senior Afghan and European officials working here.
"We are already a narco-state," says Mohammad Nader Nadery at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has studied the growing impunity of former military commanders and drug dealers who now work within the Afghan government. "If the governors in many parts of the country are involved in the drug trade, if a minister is directly or indirectly getting benefits from drug trade, and if a chief of police gets money from drug traffickers, then how else do you define a narco-state?"
Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan's minister of tribal and frontier affairs, says that the government has become so full of drug smugglers that cabinet meetings have become a farce. "Sometimes the people who complain the loudest about theft are thieves themselves," he says.
In the past two years, the UN reports that poppy cultivation increased by two-thirds in 2004 to 323,708 acres. Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world's opium - most of it ends up on the streets of Europe and Russia as heroin. European officials warn that this fledgling democracy is being undermined as Afghan officials make decisions based on what's good for the drug trade, rather than the electorate. [ Editor's note: The original version overstated the extent of poppy cultivation.]'

Lees verder: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p01s04-wosc.html

Kort samengevat: de Nederlandse regering en de meerderheid van ons parlement heeft inmiddels al een half miljard euro aan belastinggeld gespendeerd aan het in het zadel houden van Afghaanse krijgsheren die aan de heroinehandel miljoenen verdienen. Dat is nog eens een staaltje democratie. En nu opletten of de commerciele massamedia hier serieus onderzoek gaat verrichten. Ik denk het niet, maar je weet maar nooit. Let u op!

Misschien dat NOVA-presentator Twan Huys zijn eigen mening dat de Nederlandse troepen daar moeten blijven, nog eens kan verduidelijken voor het televisiepubliek van het VARA-programma De Wereld Draait Door, waarin hij deze deskundige mening spuide.