How Britain Ran Afghanistan's Helmand Opium.

April 6, 2010 (LPAC)—Afghanistan's Helmand province produces almost 4,000 tons of opium annually. That amount is almost 60% of Afghanistan's total opium production. However, Helmand was never such a large producer of opium. It became so after the British troops, under the leadership of the Empire-server Tony Blair, took over control of Helmand.

Cultivation in Helmand Province more than tripled between 2002 and 2007, bringing the area under opium poppy cultivation in 2007 to nearly equal the area cultivated in Afghanistan in 2005 (104,000 hectares), according to the UNODC 2007 survey of opium production in Afghanistan.

In May 2005, during an interview with CNN's "Late Edition," Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai laid the blame for the explosion of opium production in his country at the feet of the U.S. and Britain. "This particular operation in Kandahar or in other parts of the country, which have not been so successful, was supposed to be done by an agency, a department that was funded by the international community, by the United States, by Britain. The failure is theirs, not ours," said Karzai.

Why did Karzai make this accusation? At a conference on "Afghanistan's Reconstruction: The Future," at the University of Nebraska on Oct. 3, 2008, a document said: "In 2002, the farmers were confident about the future when the U.S. returned, following the years of darkness of the Soviet occupation and the anarchy of the 1990s. The farmers of central Helmand had great hopes, expressed enthusiasm and provided substantial support for U.S. funded reconstruction projects in 2002 and an earlier project initiative that was pioneered in 1998. Both of these efforts focused on the central Helmand irrigation system, and the elimination of opium poppy. The farmers then lost confidence and hope after the closing of AIP (Afghan Integrated Program) activities in early 2005 because of security problems. After 2005, there were some nominal if expensive follow-on projects but these typically did not directly benefit the farmers or the agricultural economy, and sometimes to the farmers, they seemed irrelevant investments."

Get this: Once the AIP was shut down, Helmand was handed over to the British. Some 7,000 British troops moved in to take over the "security" of Helmand. Within a year, Helmand was on the verge of becoming the world's biggest drugs supplier, cultivating more opium than entire countries, such as Myanmar, Morocco, or even Colombia.

Britain once again got control of a chunk of the world's opium supply. In the 18th Century, it was the opium that helped Britain to build its colonial empire.

Obama's Opium War