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Farmers Vow to Resist Eradication

Afghani opium farmers staged a demonstration on Monday, chanting anti-government slogans and vowing to resist President Hamid Karzai's plans to destroy their crop.

"We will fight," said a demonstrator on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad. "They will either destroy our harvests or kill us. We will not let them do this even if they send planes and tanks."

Farmers took their complaints to their local authorities saying they needed the income since a quarter of century of warfare has destroyed the infrastructure needed for other crops.

They said they would stop growing the opium poppies if the central government provided assistance to rebuild their roads, schools and hospitals.

Local officials refused to comment about the protests and said the opium eradication policy was decided by Kabul.

Meanwhile the central government, at the urging of the US, is planning to start eradication attempts this week in an effort to head off the annual harvest which is about to begin. The plan appears to have been concocted at last week's conference in Berlin, where western nations as predicted offered only 4.5 billion in aid rather than the 28 billion Afghanistan requested as being necessary to rebuild the infrastructure.

Once again our governments' solution is to spend money on destructive rather than constructive policy which will do almost nothing to eliminate the poppy harvest and will only cause further suffering for the indigenous Afghanis trying to scratch a living from land, too long devastated by warfare.

The people are, some three years later, still without a stable government or even decent roads. Is this what the Bush adminstration meant when they called the war Operation Enduring Freedom? Free to do what one might ask.