The Associated Press: Report: Afghans hampering US banking program
Efforts to track and protect U.S. tax dollars and other international aid are entangled in a web of Afghan banking scandals that have been fast developing in recent weeks:Drug trade menaces Afghanistan despite progress: U.S. | Reuters
—The former head of the central bank, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, fled late last month to the U.S. amid allegations of failing to act on warnings about widespread corruption at the nation's largest private lender, Kabul Bank. He said he left after receiving death threats and that he was being made a scapegoat while the government refused to charge politically connected individuals.
In Afghanistan, which supplies about 77 percent of the world's opium, nationwide opium poppy cultivation fell by one-third to 304,000 acres in 2009 from a peak level of 477,000 acres in 2007, Nichols told the panel.Huge poppy seed cache confiscated in Afghanistan - CNN.com
Poppy cultivation did not increase in 2010 despite the highest opium prices since 2004, and the number of poppy-free provinces has steadily increased to 20 in 2009-2010 from 6 in 2006, added Nichols.
The opium poppy can be used to make heroin and other drugs, and is considered a staple of insurgent funding.UN wants 'flood of drugs' in Afghanistan to devalue opium | World news | guardian.co.uk
Afghanistan is considered the world's leading cultivator of opium poppy, ahead of Myanmar, according to a 2011 United Nations report.
The country accounts for 63% of the world's total areas under opium poppy cultivation, despite a smaller harvest last year due to an unspecified disease in opium plants.
United Nations officials in Afghanistan are attempting to create a "flood of drugs" in the country intended to destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.Opium fields guarded by US troops in Afghanistan
After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in Afghanistan's volatile south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country in the first place.
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