America Abandons Afghanistan to Drug Lords
This year, Western troops will withdraw from Afghanistan after 13 years of war. They’ll leave behind an undefeated enemy – as well as an Afghan government that’s shaky, corrupt and only nominally democratic.
But the West will be counting the true cost of the war for years to come – no longer in blood and treasure but in an epidemic of heroin addiction that’s sweeping the world, driven by an explosion of Afghan opium production.
Afghanistan’s drug output is up by nearly 50 percent in the last year, according to a recent United Nations report. Afghan opium profits totaled $68 billion globally, but less than 10 percent of that remains in Afghanistan, said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Full story: Newsweek