Canadian troops in Afghanistan have encountered their most formidable foe to date, a forest of the sticky-icky-icky. Yes, 10 foot tall marijuana plants have posed a serious problem, as Taliban fighters use the greenery as cover. In response, the crew of at least one Canadian armored car has used the weed to camouflage their vehicle. It is unknown whether the soldiers have also started “camouflaging” the inside of the tank with blacklight posters.

General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff said, “the challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices … and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests.” So far, Hillier’s troops have tried burning away the forests with white phosphorous and diesel fuel, but their level of water saturation made them virtually unburnable. “A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said.

Maybe I’m just a skeptic, but I find it unlikely that the Taliban would actually use marijuana plants as cover. Afterall, this is the same fundamentalist Muslim group that destroyed two ancient stone Buddhas because they considered them “false idols”, and nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan by jailing poppy farmers and destroying heroin labs. So if the Taliban didn’t hesitate in destroying the Buddhas in 2001, why wouldn’t they also destroy this batch of Buddha in 2006? What are your thoughts?

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thanks to Yaz for the story