Newsweek: Afghan Farmers Forced To Sell Their Daughters To Pay Loans

Newsweek:

Khalida's father says she's 9--or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter," says Shah.

The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. "It's my fate," the child says.

Read the whole story: Newsweek

Comments

[TXfemmom]

The United States and the world could eradicate the poppy growing by merely paying these Afghan farmers what they would make for their poppies, and then assist them in growing other crops to supplement that and the farmers, their families and daughters would be safe. Even if the assistance included grains and other foods, or a few animals per family to assist, it would cost much less than fighting the Taliban, who derive their income from the poppies, and the drug cartels. We spend billions on guns and could spend far less just to pay the farmers the money they could get for the poppies and assistance in small ways.

[citizenofmars]

Don't you get it? Opium is the only reason we're in Afghanistan. It's the only reason the CIA invented AlQaeda in the first place, to prevent the Taliban and the Russians from cornering the world's morphine market. Same reason we were in Laos and Cambodia. The "Golden Triangle" financed a huge portion of the "Vietnam" war. Smack fuels our "war" in Afghanistan just like oil fuels our "war" in Iraq.

[esaid]

And we are borrowing billions to spend in Iraq!