Combat Engineers in Action...

[PatriotnMore]

Glad to hear you're well, I am reading it's been quite active in the Stan. Watch your six, happy hunting.

Doing good. Busier than Bill Clinton in a whorehouse above a cigar shop.

We are leaving in 2 weeks for a smaller Forward Operating Base up near the Pakistani border to do some hunting

[tteng]

Soldier415,

Let me ask you,

Why don't we just de-foliate the poppy fields and be done w/ opium-supported Taliban? This way you starve the Taliban and rid the drug at the same time.

[Soldier415]

Soldier415,

Let me ask you,

Why don't we just de-foliate the poppy fields and be done w/ opium-supported Taliban? This way you starve the Taliban and rid the drug at the same time.

Because we would be cutting off one of the only ways for people to feed their families in a lot of areas and we'd starve them too.

Thereby turning the population against us.

Its a rock and a hard place.

[Oregonish]

^^ never thought of that.

[PatriotnMore]

Is anything being done to bring in agriculture specialists, and bring $$ to the table to give these farmers viable options to poppy? Could the problem also be that, to the farmers, the poppy is the only viable option because the other crops don't pay as well?

Because we would be cutting off one of the only ways for people to feed their families in a lot of areas and we'd starve them too.

Thereby turning the population against us.

Its a rock and a hard place.

[Soldier415]

Is anything being done to bring in agriculture specialists, and bring $$ to the table to give these farmers viable options to poppy? Could the problem also be that to the farmers, the poppy is the only viable option because the other crops don't pay as well?

Yes. They are trying to bring in as many as they can, but it isn't easy. The problem is that thanks to the russians and then years and years of civil war...a large amount of the land here is heavily mined and unusable for large scale agricultural use. The economy alos collapsed, as well as infrastructure needed to bring the crops to market or export them.

All of this is being addressed, but it was destroyed over decades and cannot be corrected overnight.

If you remove the poppy crop, you take away the one way a man has to feed and provide for his family. If he does not have his poppy crop, he is then more susceptible to accepting money from the taliban to attack coalition forces.

If you are sitting there with your children starving...and someone offers you enough money to feed them for a year if you go and put a bomb in the road or shoot an RPG at a convoy...are you going to do it or watch your family die of starvation?

Not condoning it, just pointing out that this is a VERY common situation here.