But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.’

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.

1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Bill Fisk’s war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide – that of a million and a half Armenians – laying the foundations for a second, that of the Jews of Europe.

On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium – around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the

President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation.

but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they – or their Afghan satellites – killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered

Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts – brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers – seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.