Agence France-Presse,
Brussels (AFP): The 26 NATO nations told the UN drugs office on Wednesday that they would boost their efforts to counter the flood of heroin from Afghanistan but could not assume the Kabul government's role, a diplomatic source said.
“We have agreed to try to do more to tackle the culture and the trafficking of opium, within our own competences,” the source told AFP after a meeting of nations and bodies involved in the security and reconstruction of Afghanistan, held at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
The NATO allies “are offering their utmost but without substituting themselves for the Afghan authorities,” he added.
The Afghan government said Monday it had asked international military forces based there to clear Taliban-led insurgents from opium-growing areas before Afghan troops move in to destroy poppy crops.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) made a similar call last month when it released a survey which showed that Afghanistan's opium production had shot up by a third over the past year to a record high.
UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa renewed that call in Brussels Wednesday.
“I hope NATO will recognise the threat to its own operations by increasing the support to anti-narcotics operations,” he said.
“Afghans need to be assisted, need aerial support, logistic support, operations against the labs and the traffickers,” he added while stressing that this does not mean any change in NATO's rules of engagement.
“It's a question of interpretation by the commanders on the ground.”
The 39,000 troops of the international security assistance force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, commanded by NATO, “will offer increased logistical support to the Afghans, with whom they will share information,” the diplomat said.
This could take the form of soldiers allowing Afghan police free to operate in their areas but “there is no question that they (the troops) will launch a programme of eradication of poppy-growing,” he said.
Afghanistan accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's heroin supply and officials say a big portion of the over three billion US dollars (2.2 billion euros) generated each year from the trade of the drug helps finance the Taliban insurgency.
The government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai is opposed to any idea of a systematic campaign, for example via chemical products, to wipe out the poppy fields, even in the southern areas controlled by the Taliban and allied drug traffickers.
Afghanistan's opium production has doubled in two years, reaching a new high in 2007, with the country almost the exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug, the United Nations announced last week.
