Of poppies and Father's Day

Here is a mystery. appropriate for Father's Day and for my Dad who served heroically in WWII.

When the USA invaded Afghanistan, the one thing the Taliban were reported to have done that was good was cracking down on the poppy trade.

Now, however, we read that the (presumably Taliban) insurgents in Afghanistan are using the poppy trade to finance their insurgency. Given the strong prohibitions against drugs in the Quran, I wondered if the original story was untrue and the Taliban were hypocritical?

Lee, at HorsesAss and at Blog Reload, corrected me:

Nope. Completely incorrect.

In the 2000/2001 cultivating period, the Taliban used violent reprisals and severe punishment to cause opium production to plummet from 3,276 mt in 2000 to only 185 mt in 2001 - a fall of a staggering 94 percent. In areas under its control, the Taliban was uncompromisingly tough, allowing it to complete, according to the London-based Independent newspaper “one of the quickest and most successful drug elimination programmes in history”.

I suspect he is correct. Here is a more extensive report saying the same thing about the then rulers of Afghanistan. But this leads to another issue. If we and the Muslim right both agree on drugs, isn't this an opportunity to collaborate? If there are issues we and the Imans and Mullahs share, why not find common ground?

I fund a good analysis of the current situation on a blog called From the Wilderness. Here is a summary.

FTW reported that the US uses Uzbekistan to stage operations into Afghanistan since September 11. Uzbekhistan, in turn grow poppies. Of course, the Uzbeki government is not part of the righteous Islam movement and they are fighting their own battle against a Muslim insurgency. The question FTW raises is frightening. Whose side are we on? FTW reports that Richard Secord has recently traveled to Tashkent. Secord was one of the CIA agents involved in heroin smuggling, from Vietnam, Laos and Thailand in the 1960's and and during the Iran-Contra years. Is the USA supporting the poppy growers because they are opposed to the Taliban?

I would tend to think FTW was being an extremist, but his version Iand lee's) fit too neatly into past history of the Reagan-Bush I, Bush II tradition. Frightening.

In the spirit of irony, I turned to the Veterans of Foreign Wars .. the folks who sell poppies to support our vets. "The VFW has made that trademark a guarantee that all poppies bearing that name and the VFW label are genuine products of the work of disabled and needy veterans. No other organization, firm or individual can legally use the name "Buddy" Poppy." They explained the poppies history with the famous poem:

In Flander's Field by John McCrae
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved and now we lie,
In Flanders Fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw,
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us, who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow,
In Flanders Fields.
And yet, times do change,
and now I wonder,
Do poppies yet grow yet in Flanders Fields
and are they made by vet's scarred hands?
Or do more potent poppies grow in Afghanistan,
Under the cruel hands of warlords while,
now the paper poppie is
assembled in China
to make our wounded vets more efficient?

(words added in black).


Happy Father's Day.