Photo essay by Paolo Pellegrin, Magnum Photos: In Afghanistan opium fuels everything from the culture, the politics, the economy and the resurgent Taliban fighters. Paolo Pellegrin went to the remote southern provinces where the war on drugs, alongside that with the insurgency is raging. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) is working in Afghanistan alongside the Afghan National Interdiction Unit, carrying out raids in remote villages. Links are being made between the resurgence of the Taliban and the drug industry, as both have nothing to gain from the area being controlled by central government. With the large amounts of money to be made from trafficking opium, criminality and corruption are rife, programmes set up to wean farmers off of producing the poppies neglected to track down the networks doing the trafficking, an unclear policy towards totally freeing areas from the duel influence of poppy growing and the Taliban shows itself through the presence of the D.E.A and it’s frustration not to be carrying out the two monthly missions that was their objective on arriving, through lack of military support. Here.

Photos by Paolo Pellegrin from MagnumPhotos: Last October’s earthquake in Kashmir was the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The tremor killed more than 80,000 people and injured hundred of thousands. Eight months after the catastrophy, some 3 million people still remain homeless. The relief operation has been ongoing and massive: helicopters have flown more than 27,000 sorties into the Himalayan region in northern Pakistan, where the 7.6-magnitude quake was centered. They’ve dropped off some 30,000 tons of provisions–food, medicine, blankets and tents. Still, the reconstruction of the 600,000 homes in the region has barely begun, and all the villages in the quake zone, one of the poorest and most remote in the world before the disaster, have sunk even deeper into poverty. Here.