29 October 2004
Afghan Narcotics Trafficking to Be Targeted in Coming Months
State's Charles says Afghan, coalition forces to cooperate against traffickers
By Afzal Khan
Washington File Special Correspondent
Washington -- The international coalition in Afghanistan and the Afghan government are planning to increase efforts to interdict narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan during the coming months, according to a senior U.S. official.
"Over the next couple of months, there will be a dramatic upturn in overall counter-narcotics interdiction, not only by the coalition but by the Afghan government," Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) Robert Charles recently told the Washington File.
"We are working methodically to increase the capacity of the Afghan government to eliminate opium crops and heroin processing facilities, train the police and the Afghan National Army to interdict, and to build a working justice sector," he said. He said that opium harvest is expected to hit a record.
Charles said that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and international partners such as the United Kingdom are working closely to deal with the Afghan narcotics issue.
Charles said his organization meets with the DOD almost daily. Interdiction efforts by the U.S. military have increased since November 2003 as troops operating near the Pakistan border in the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaida suspects come across drug traffickers, who may be involved with the terrorists, he said.
The Bush administration in August announced that Harold Wankel, DEA's assistant administrator for its intelligence division, will be dispatched to Kabul to oversee counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan. Wankel will report directly to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Charles said.
U.S. forces are conducting poppy-eradication operations in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, as British forces are in the southern province of Helmand, in cooperation with the provincial governors and their security forces, Charles said.
Germany is engaged in the training of police officers who can help interdict drug traffickers, Charles said. In addition to a central police-training center in Kabul, regional training centers have been established in Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif, Gardez and Jalalabad, which have turned out over 25,000 trained police officers in the past year, he said. Charles said that these police officers played a key role in safeguarding the polling centers during the October 9 presidential elections. Additional training centers are being established in Bamiyan and Herat. By the end of December 2005, the goal is to have trained 50,000 national police, 12,000 border police and 2,600 highway police, Charles said.
In a parallel development, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said USAID is designing pilot projects for poppy substitution crops in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, and also possibly in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Frank Kenefick, a retired USAID expert on crop substitution, said the projects will be "superimposed" on existing agricultural rehabilitation programs already put in place.
Afghanistan produces three-quarters of the world's opium, and heroin trafficking has become the mainstay of its economy. A report of the Economist Intelligence Unit in May estimated the total value of opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 at $2.3 billion, representing more than 50 percent of the country's legal gross domestic product.
Over 90 percent of the heroin produced from Afghanistan's opium goes to European and Russian markets. European countries and Russia, under the aegis of the G8 group of world economic leaders, have become deeply involved in narcotics interdiction in Afghanistan.
After the United States dismantled the Taliban regime in December 2001, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the international community came together to reconstruct an Afghanistan battered by three decades of Soviet and warlord rule. A meeting of the G8 took place in Tokyo in January 2002 to pledge support for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. "Lead donors" were designated for the different "security sectors." The creation of an Afghan national army was the responsibility of the United States and France; the building up of a national police force was Germany's responsibility; the disarmament of the warlord militias was left to Japan; the reformation of the judiciary was a task allotted to Italy; and the interdiction of narcotics became the responsibility of the United Kingdom.
At a conference in Washington in early October, a senior figure in the International Crisis Group (ICG) who just returned from Afghanistan said that "a policy change" is needed to effectively curb opium production. Mark Schneider, who heads ICG's Washington office, said that the British efforts are not sufficient and it is now time for the United States to "intervene more effectively." Schneider is a former Assistant Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as the former director of the U.S. Peace Corps.
At the same conference, titled "The Countdown to Afghanistan's Election: Security, Narco-Terrorism and Prospects for Democracy," another leading expert on Afghanistan emphasized that poppy crop eradication should play a secondary role to the interdiction of traffickers and the destruction of laboratories that process raw opium into morphine and heroin. Barnett Rubin, director of New York University's Center on International Cooperation, quoted a senior Afghan government official as telling him that "traffickers create cultivators" rather than the reverse.
Rubin explained that opium poppy farmers take advance loans from the drug lords or traffickers before the autumn planting season (opium is a winter crop) and then repay them in the spring depending on what the going price is then for a kilogram of raw opium paste. The prices frequently fluctuate and if the price of raw opium paste has fallen from that of the previous year, the farmer may become a perpetual debtor to the drug lord or trafficker. Such debts may even result in the "selling" of the farmer's daughter to the drug lord or trafficker.
But experts universally agree that the goal of a long-term counter-narcotics policy must take into account the provision of an alternative livelihood to the poppy farmer. Such a program must not only include the growing of legitimate crops but also the provision of credit for seeds and fertilizers and the assurance of successful marketing of the produce. Access to yearlong employment, both farm and nonfarm, is also necessary in such a plan so that the farmer does not revert to poppy growing to supplement a meager income.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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