From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: The Taliban are trying to fight Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar drug trade. In April, the government outlawed poppy cultivation, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.
But stamping out opium will be difficult. Farmers use cheap and highly efficient solar panels to power the water pumps that irrigate poppy fields and cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, says The New York Times. Subsistence farmers use them on vegetable plots. The panels, which also provide electricity to homes, are now a defining feature of southern Afghan life.
The Taliban have taken aim at some solar-powered pumps. A regional leader ordered them to be confiscated so that newly planted poppies would die. But a widespread crackdown would exacerbate Afghanistan’s postwar economic collapse — the U.N. estimates that 23 million Afghans are suffering from acute food deprivation — and antagonize Pashtun farmers, a core constituency of the Taliban.
Data: Thanks to the pumps, the population of previously uninhabited desert areas in Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz Provinces ballooned to at least 1.4 million with the expansion of arable land.
Finances: Opium sales provide 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with the roughly 9 percent that legal exports of goods and services provide.
Background: In the 1990s, the Taliban reduced opium cultivation. But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the group’s insurgency. Now, eradication would require confronting commanders complicit in the trade at a time when the movement faces internal dissatisfaction as its money dries up.
