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TIME: What about a threat that is very much homegrown, and is happening throughout the country, which is the drug problem?
Karzai: That is a threat. Yes, that is our problem. Poppy cultivation is our problem. But it is like a disease. It has a point of beginning, it has a point of spreading and it must also have a point of treatment. We should see how this disease came about in Afghanistan. The sheer desperation of the Afghan people when the Soviets invaded, when the country was destroyed, when families no longer had any hope if their children would be alive the next minute, or if they would be staying in their homes the next day or if they would be in their country the next day. So the easiest crop, with the quickest cash, was poppy. I know of people in the southwest of the country who destroyed their pomegranate fields to replace them with poppy. And that should be tremendously dispiriting condition for a person, for a family, to destroy that beautiful orchard and replace it with poppies.
Then, mixed with this is the influence of the Mafia and the international drug dealer circles, for whom the more unstable Afghanistan is, the better it is for their greed and their moneymaking. While this has happened, it has also become an economic reality. Droughts, war, desperation, lack of hope for a future in the past 30 years, add to that the past nine years of droughts. We have a serious problem. Two years ago, after my inauguration, I spoke to the Afghan people and asked them to stop growing and they responded. I told the international community, look, this time it was an emotional decision, for a moral call by me to stop growing and they will do it. Next year the harsh realities of life will settle in again. People will want to marry their sons and daughters. People will want to be able to cure their sick ones, people will want to have a better life, and people will want to have something to eat. And unless we provide them with a stronger reconstruction and alternative livelihood they will go back to poppies.
In other words, the honeymoon will be over. And that is exactly what we have this year. Add to that, the encouragement that comes from outside, from the international Mafia. Now if the poppy income for Afghanistan is between $2 billion to $2.5 billion, when it reaches international markets it reaches $50 billion. So where is the rest of the money? Who benefits more? There is a lot of difference between 2.5 and 50. Where is that $48 billion going? And do you think that $48 billion will allow us to destroy poppy in Afghanistan? Therefore we need to have a very comprehensive program. The mistake was that there was a concentration at the same time on three important things in Afghanistan. We became relaxed in the fight against the regional elements of terrorism. We concentrated only on the international elements of al-Qaeda and terrorism. We ignored what was going on in the region. We ignored that the Taliban were given safe havens. We ignored that they were being trained again. We ignored to strengthen the police. And at the same time we concentrated strongly on the eradication, coupled unfortunately with corruption. We called some of the police forces corrupt, and yet we used those same police forces to go and eradicate. So: resentment in the farmers.