17 November 2004
U.S. to Help Afghanistan Attack Narcotics Industry
Assistant Secretary of State Charles outlines five-prong counternarcotics plan
By David Shelby
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The rise in poppy cultivation and opium production in Afghanistan has become a primary concern of the Afghan government, and the United States has committed to help the Afghans in their efforts to eliminate the narcotics industry in their country.
"They have done a remarkable job in saying unequivocally and unprompted, there will be no future in the heroin economy long term in this country. That's a very firm commitment," said Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Robert Charles during a November 17 briefing in Washington.
He added that Afghan President Hamid Karzai "has begun to initiate a lot of the institutional change that will support a robust counternarcotics effort."
Charles said the United States expects to spend approximately $780 million over the coming year in order to buttress the Afghans' counternarcotics efforts in five main areas.
The first pillar of what Charles called "Plan Afghanistan" is a public information campaign. The United States will assist the Afghan government in its efforts to raise public awareness about the dangers of drugs and the illegal drug trade for Afghans and their families.
The United States will also help the Afghan government build an effective justice system that is capable of ensuring proper law enforcement.
The third pillar of the cooperative effort is to provide alternative livelihoods to farmers and communities where poppy cultivation is currently an economic mainstay.
This includes agricultural extension projects, providing seeds and fertilizer for alternative crops, as well as micro-credit loans to make the alternatives financially viable. It also means building agricultural and transportation infrastructure to ensure that legitimate crops can be produced and carried to market.
The fourth area of cooperation will be in interdiction of opium production. This involves the destruction of clandestine processing labs as well as supplies of chemical precursors used in the production process and stockpiles of refined opiates.
The final area of attack on the narcotics industry will be crop eradication. Charles said that when farmers see crops being destroyed, they will think twice about planting poppy again.
He said that all of these efforts together will encourage people to move away from the opium economy and towards legitimate livelihoods. "Once you begin to tackle this by raising the risks and costs of growing and processing poppy, which is quite doable, you end up creating an equilibrium in which the other legitimate market begins to flow," he said.
The United States' involvement in Afghanistan's counternarcotics operations is an interagency effort involving participants from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Defense Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Charles said, however, that the Afghan government is driving this process. "This is an Afghan led solution to an Afghan problem, and they have identified what they want. And we have identified what we can give."
(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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