China’s Global Times has some sound advice for the U.S. and its Western partners on how to best stop opium, build security, and secure political liberties in Afghanistan: help get its economy going again.
While the West “ponders” whether to give aid to Afghanistan, China’s ambassador in Kabul was busy opening an “Afghan trade lifeline.” The ambassador arranged for a Nov. 1 air shipment of 45 tons of Afghan pine nuts from Kabul to Shanghai. There, they were quickly packed and quickly sold on-line, Global Times reporter Mu Lu wrote yesterday, in an article titled “Afghans deserve to be better off through hard work, not planting opium.”
“How can a country achieve stability and long-term development, if its people live on drug cultivation?” Mu asked. Under the occupation and war, Afghanistan’s old infrastructure was destroyed, little new built, agriculture and animal husbandry stagnated, and Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of opium. Washington now promises to offer humanitarian assistance, but only after freezing “nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank …. sow[ing] the seeds of economic collapse in Afghanistan.”
