[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. I tried searching the database for any of these keywords: narc, opium, heroin, drug, poppy. It came up with 800 hits, which look like this:
Note the concentration in the south (Hilmand) and the east.
Now let’s zoom in on one of the areas, one the clusters of points you see in the south:
[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. I tried searching the database for any of these keywords: narc, opium, heroin, drug, poppy. It came up with 800 hits, which look like this:
Note the concentration in the south (Hilmand) and the east.
Now let’s zoom in on one of the areas, one the clusters of points you see in the south:
It doesn’t look like there’s anything special about this pattern of points. Or is there?
Well, Afghanistan Information Management Services (AIMS) provides a map of cultivated areas in Afghanistan. When you put the cultivated areas of Afghanistan (green) under the drug incidents (red) for this Hilmand zoom, you see that there are incidents in virtually all the cultivated area in this map:
The same holds, on a quick glance, for the other clusters in the south and east. Noting such caveats as the fact that this is 800/76,000 hits, and that much of the cultivated area in the north has very few drug-war related hits, these NATO activities would still be antagonizing to Afghan farmers of the south and east, which is also where the war is mostly concentrated. This is the whole country’s cultivated areas (green) and the “narc-opium-drug-heroin-poppy” hits in red:
It’s something I’ll be looking at in more detail.
