ABSTRACT
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2010) estimates that during the past decade, some 70-90 per cent of the world's supply of illicit opiates came from Afghanistan. Revenues from this crop are equivalent to from approximately one-third of the licit agricultural sector Gross National Product (GNP) to as high as 35 per cent of total GNP. UNODC has exit strategies for specific project components, but regards its partnership with the Kohsan communities as being open-ended, reaching into the indefinite future. According to SIGAR (2010) 'Corruption, widely acknowledged to be a pervasive, systemic problem across Afghanistan, corrodes the Afghan government's legitimacy and undermines international development efforts'. That certainly played a role, but the marked degree of land degradation is a negative synergy of factors, the nexus between conflict and what appears to be the local result of global climate change, writ in the dry lands of western Afghanistan.
