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According to a new UN report, the opium trade in Afghanistan has reached record production levels this year, largely due to corrupt government officials who have been protecting drug production.
The Associated Press writes that the report, a joint effort of the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, shows a "probability of high-level (government) involvement," particularly in the Interior Ministry, which controls Afghanistan's police force.
"The majority of police chiefs are involved," one senior police officer told the report's authors on condition of anonymity. "If you are not, you will be threatened to be killed and replaced."
Without naming officials, the report said it was possible that powerful interests in the Interior Ministry are appointing district police chiefs "to both protect and promote criminal interests."
The result is a "complex pyramid of protection and patronage, effectively providing state protection to criminal trafficking activities."
Zalmai Afzali, a representative of the Afghan counternarcotics ministry, said there is no evidence of government corruption, however. "If there is evidence we welcome the evidence and the arrest will be on the spot," he said.
AP reports that the drug trade is flourishing in Afghanistan, with opium production rising 59 percent this year. The 2006 opium harvest, worth $3.1 billion, was enough to create 610 tons of heroin, and accounts for over 90 percent of the world's supply.
The Financial Times reports that counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan have actually strengthened the Afghan drug traffickers by "consolidating the trade among a tiny elite of traffickers."
"Around 25 to 30 key traffickers, the majority of them based in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions." ...
"Interdiction efforts especially need to target high-level profiteers whose wealth magnifies their potential for corrupting the state," the report said.
Strategies aimed at short-term reductions in opium production in the worst affected areas could do more harm than good, fuelling "discontent and strengthening the insurgency in the volatile south of the country".
In a briefing for The Times of London, Bronwen Maddox writes that the report recommends a focus on long-term solutions to Afghanistan's opium economy, which could take "decades."
Despite a fondness for management consultant vocabulary, the report comes up with sensible suggestions. Efforts should be concentrated in areas where farmers have good access to land and water, and so could grow something else; experience shows that that is where success is greatest.
It recommends focusing enforcement on areas that have not yet become dependent on drugs (and notes that opium still takes up only 3 per cent of farmland). The authors also urge agencies to anticipate the inevitable, painful effects of a successful crackdown, such as soaring rural poverty and the indebtedness of those who were relying on future drug income.
Most urgent, they say, is the need to rip the trade out of the police and Interior Ministry before it has become more entrenched.
Complicating the drug industry problem is its growing ties to the Taliban. Last week, The Christian Science Monitor reported that the Taliban is now a major player in the Afghan opium trade.
"There is no question at all that the Taliban has been increasingly involved both directly and indirectly in narcotics," says Seth Jones, an analyst at the Rand Corp.
Evidence is growing that the Taliban and their allies are moving beyond taxing the trade to protecting opium shipments, running heroin labs, and even organizing farm output in areas they control. "It's reached the point where about half of the opium we seize in the provinces has some link to the Taliban," says Gen. Ali Shah Paktiawal, director of the anticriminal branch of the Kabul police.
Another senior Afghan security official says captured Taliban have confessed that most funding comes from drugs.
The Monitor notes that the Taliban's shift from populist motives to criminal goals is reminiscent of a similar evolution by the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which was originally a leftist movement but became entangled in the cocaine trade.
The Globe and Mail reports that the United States has persuaded the Afghan government to take a page from the anti-FARC playbook and try to eradicate poppy crops by spraying herbicide. Afghanistan has not tried chemical spraying before, due to President Hamid Karzai's concerns about its effects on villagers and legal crops. The Globe and Mail notes that when those tactics were used in Colombia on its coca crop, their effect was dubious.
U.S. contractors working in Afghanistan, such as DynCorp, have experience with spraying herbicides on drug crops. DynCorp aircraft reportedly spray herbicides on coca fields in Colombia, but a report by the international think tank Senlis Council suggests this wasn't effective, damaged the environment and killed the crops that ordinary people need to survive.
"Evidence shows that aerial spraying directly led to an increase in social unrest, instability and violence," says the Senlis report.
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Feedback appreciated. E-mail Arthur Bright.
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