Rentagob Howells ... Poppy Day will be early this year...

Foreign Office Minister, accident probe, Welsh windbag Kim Howells, in an interview with BBC Radio Four's Today programme, visiting Afghanistan ahead of the UK assuming control of operations from the US next month in Helmund , said that he expected that poppy cultivation in the country could even be higher again this year following recent record harvests after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.

"I don't think it has got worse," the minister said, adding that Britain, which is lead G8 country with responsibility for combating drugs in Afghanistan, was "learning much."

"We don't know how much opium and harvest was produced" under the Taliban regime, he insisted. The country was "completely lawless" and no one could find out, he said.... as distinct from now when the country is "completely lawless".

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said earlier this year that the eradication of Afghanistan's poppy fields would be a much longer process than first thought.... which is surprising because his Kandahar based brother Ahmed Wali Karzai is heavily involved in the business.... and helped finance Hamid's election.

The admission of a further bumper crop came as the Ministry of Interior's counter narcotics forces conducted their first ever drugs raid into Zaranj, capital of Nimruz Province, on the border with Iran.

"Whilst other forces are attacking the big opium dealers in Helmand, (ie the real heavy lifting) in Nimruz we are attacking other parts of the opium snake that is trying to poison the nation of Afghanistan," the spokesman said.

Howells was visiting British civilians and troops in Helmand province of southern Afghanistan the centre of opium and heroin production in Afghanistan.

Defense Minister John Reid told the Commons that he would "not hide" the "difficulties and risks of this deployment". A former Foreign Office adviser, now a consultant in the United States, described Reid's comments as "delusional". He said: "Reid makes it sounds as though Afghanistan is a unified, well-policed, controlled country that is facing some imminent terrorist threat or a return of the Taliban. Someone should tell him there is no unified or controlled Afghanistan .... and someone should tell him the Taliban never really left.

Richard Haass, George Bush's head of policy planning in his first term, he also co-ordinated policy on the future of Afghanistan and knows both the Iraq and Afghanistan policies inside out, being an architect and adviser on both.

"A barely functioning Iraq, with a weak central government and highly autonomous regions, such as a secular Kurdish-dominated north; a religious, Shi'ite-dominated south, a Sunni-dominated west; and a demographically mixed and unsettled centre that takes in Baghdad." Haass said: "Think of it as a version of today's Afghanistan - minus the poppy fields."


The 6000 ill equipped British troops (taxpayer cost £1Bn.), at the end of a very long and stretched supply chain, with a dangerous and and ill defined war against the opium trade , whilst a fully stretched US force elsewhere tries to keep the peace, contains a much wider significance than John Reid might care to admit.Yorkshire Ranter has some well informed information about aerial support etc.,

LATE GOOD NEWS IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Delivering his address on the GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR at the Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte in North Carolina, Bush commended President Pervez Musharraf for making a choice to side with the international community in the fight against terrorism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. “Colin Powell did a wonderful job of talking to President Musharraf in a very respectful and dignified way,” he said.

Musharraf is of course a military dictator who declared himself President after a military coup and amended the Constitution so that he could make any law, and the courts and Parliament cannot change any such law.

Which is why perhaps the President went on to say there had been 4 attempts on President Mushariff's .... and maybe this is why he holding him back from following his example.

Good to have such friends.