The 2014 pullout of U.S.-led combat troops from Afghanistan appears to be having a major impact on the country's narcotics trade, with opium poppy cultivation growing to a record high this year, according to a U.N. report released Wednesday.
The boom underscores the failure of U.S.-led international efforts to fight opium poppy cultivation that have cost U.S. taxpayers some $4.42 billion since 2002. Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium, which contains morphine, the alkaloid from which heroin is produced.
The narcotics trade is a key driver of official corruption and a major source of income for the Taliban-led insurgency. Various estimates put the amount of money earned annually by the insurgency from the narcotics economy at between $70 million and $400 million.
In its annual survey of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime and the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics charted a 36 percent increase this year to a record 209,000 hectares, up from 154,000 hectares in 2012. The previous high was 193,000 hectares in 2007.
The United States will mark the 84th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval...
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...:focal(1285x1016:1286x1017)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d1/4e/d14ed238-3b62-4506-9f53-fc2178dade60/nov2025_d17_prologue.jpg)
In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland...
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial...
