The Guardian, Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.
Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world's biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates despite the introduction of western programmes aimed at eliminating the drug .
The UN's annual survey of Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation and production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international community, humanitarian organisations and charities to wean Afghan farmers off the lucrative crop.
The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this year's harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the bumper production of 4,600 tonnes of opium in 1999, a year before Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.
This year's production of 3,600 tonnes represents a 6% year-on-year increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.
“The country is at a crossroads,” said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UNODC. “There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists.”
Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in western Europe, supplying 90% of the market.
The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world's illicit opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan. The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic product.
The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.
The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe via Moscow and St Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.
“Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this, the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to Kabul,” Mr Costa said.
“Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country and on its borders.”
In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.
To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition of the regime.
The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year's opium production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a “major resurgence” of poppy growing”.
Mr Costa called for stiff “interdiction measures”, backed by the international community, “to destroy the terrorists' and warlords' stake in the opium economy”.
