Farmers in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar have taken a solid step towards replacing poppy fields with pistachio plantations.

Local officials said that so far, 115 tons of pistachios have been harvested from 150 hectares of cultivated land.

They said pistachio farming is proving to be an effective alternative to poppies and that the local government is trying hard to encourage farmers to plant pistachio trees.

Most pistachio production occurs in countries with arid climates.

Turkey, Iran, Italy, and Syria are the principal pistachio producing countries, outside the United States and pistachio nuts are grown mainly for export in those countries.

Trees are also grown in Pakistan, Greece, India, and Australia.

According to some local farmers, they tend their pistachio orchards daily and employ between 30 and 60 workers.

Some farmers in Kandahar said however that establishing a pistachio orchard was costly and urged the Islamic Emirate government to assist them.

Officials from Kandahar’s Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock said pistachio farming was a good alternative to poppy cultivation. They in turn called on former poppy farmers to consider planting pistachio trees.

Pistachio trees can live up to 300 years, but they take five to seven years to begin producing nuts.

They are alternate-bearing, meaning that the harvest is heavier in some years than others.

Peak production is reached around 20 years.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview before exiting the White House that he would not make any apologies for having ending the war in Afghanistan.

Speaking to The New York Times, ahead of the Biden administration's exit, he said: “Americans don’t want us in conflict. They don’t want us in war. We went through 20 years where we had hundreds of thousands of Americans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

“People were tired of that, understandably. Well, when President Biden was vice president, he presided over the end of our engagement in Iraq. As president, he ended the longest war in our history, Afghanistan," he said.

The NYT journalist asked how the Afghanistan "failure" damaged America's credibility.

"First, I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a signal achievement of the president’s. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, that’s an important achievement in and of itself," Blinken responded. 

He did however state that “in every possible way, the manner in which this (the withdrawal) was done and the state in which Afghanistan has been left could not have been what the United States desired."

"There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. I think the question was what we were going to do moving forward from the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself," Blinken added.

The Biden administration was hit with pushback after the chaotic withdrawal. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan even reportedly offered to resign over the decision, according to The Washington Post's David Ignatius.

Sullivan also reportedly had concerns about the exit, but ultimately said it would have been challenging no matter what they did.

"You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging," Sullivan told the Post columnist. "The choice was: Leave, and it would not be easy, or stay forever."

Sullivan added that "leaving Kabul freed the [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible if we had stayed."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is increasingly likely to announce he intends to step down, though he has not made a final decision, a source familiar with Trudeau's thinking said on Sunday.

The source spoke to Reuters after the Globe and Mail reported that Trudeau was expected to announce as early as Monday that he would quit as leader of Canada's ruling Liberal Party after nine years in office.

The source requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Trudeau's departure would leave the party without a permanent head at a time when polls show the Liberals will badly lose to the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October.

Sources told the Globe and Mail that they did not know definitely when Trudeau would announce his plans to leave but said they expect it would happen before a emergency meeting of Liberal legislators on Wednesday.

An increasing number of Liberal parliamentarians, alarmed by a series of gloomy polls, have publicly urged Trudeau to quit.

The prime minister's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours. The prime minister's regularly published schedule for Monday said he would participate virtually in a cabinet committee meeting on Canada-U.S. relations.

It remains unclear whether Trudeau will leave immediately or stay on as prime minister until a new Liberal leader is selected, the Globe and Mail report added.

Trudeau took over as Liberal leader in 2013 when the party was in deep trouble and had been reduced to third place in the House of Commons for the first time.

If he does resign, it would likely spur fresh calls for a quick election to put in place a stable government able to deal with the administration of President-elect Donald Trump for the next four years.

The prime minister has discussed with Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc whether he would be willing to step in as interim leader and prime minister, one source told the newspaper, adding that this would be unworkable if LeBlanc plans to run for the leadership.

Trudeau, 53, had been able to fend off Liberal legislators worried about the polls and the loss of safe seats in two special elections.

But calls for him to step aside have grown since December, when Trudeau tried to demote Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, one of his closest cabinet allies, after she pushed back against his proposals for more spending.

Freeland quit instead and penned a letter accusing Trudeau of "political gimmicks" rather than focusing on what was best for the country.

Trudeau propelled the Liberals to power in 2015 promising "sunny ways" and a progressive agenda that promoted the rights of women and a promise to fight climate change.

But the everyday realities of governing gradually wore him down and like many Western leaders, the need to deal with the effects of the pandemic ate up much of his time.

Although Ottawa spent heavily to protect consumers and businesses, racking up record budget deficits, this provided little protection from public anger as prices soared.

A botched immigration policy led to hundreds of thousands of arrivals, straining an already overheated housing market.