Pubdate: Thu, 29 Nov 2001
Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK)
Page: 3
Copyright: Guardian Publications 2001
Contact:  http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/633
Author: Julian Borger

US TARGETS HEROIN LABORATORIES AS PART OF BOMBING CAMPAIGN

After bombing Taliban tanks, headquarters and troops, pilots from the 
United States were given a supplemental list of targets deemed to be almost 
as important to American and European security -- opium-processing 
laboratories, US officials said last week.

The bombing sorties have helped to disrupt the production of heroin from 
the opium harvest, which had already been reduced by the Taliban edict 
against poppy cultivation last year. A US state department official last 
weekend confirmed that the opium and heroin industry was one of the 
strategic targets of the bombing campaign. 'To the degree where we knew 
where the processing laboratories were, they were taken out -- if they were 
in areas which were not close to anywhere where collateral damage would 
occur,' the official said.

The Taliban prohibited poppy growing in July 2000, but did not put an end 
to the drug trade. The state department's international narcotics and law 
enforcement bureau believes that 60% of Afghan opium production over the 
past four years was not sold but warehoused. The ban may have been 
motivated by religious concerns, but it was also a sound commercial 
decision in a saturated market.

According to the United Nations office for drug control and crime 
prevention, the opium price in Afghanistan had risen from $30 a kilogram in 
June 2000 to $700 in the week before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Within days, as soon as it became clear that military retaliation against 
Afghanistan was likely, the opium brokers began selling their stocks. 
Within two weeks of the attacks the price fell to $90 a kilogram. The cash 
that the drugs brought in almost certainly went to the Taliban and al-Qaida 
war chest. "In such a tightly controlled society, it's difficult to think 
that huge stockpiles of opium would be controlled by anyone other than 
those with close links with the regime itself. So yes, the sales were with 
the complicity of the regime," said Kemal Kurspahic of the UN office.

In recent weeks the price of opium has started rising again, indicating 
that the wartime stockpiles may have been depleted. Meanwhile the price of 
heroin has risen even more sharply, probably reflecting the damage done to 
the laboratories.

There are already signs that poppies are growing in the footsteps of the 
retreating Taliban fighters. Desperate farmers have started planting in the 
traditional growing region, Helmand, where the principal 
warlord-traffickers have defected to the anti-Taliban side.

The Northern Alliance has been an enthusiastic sponsor and beneficiary of 
the trade in opium and its derivatives, heroin and morphine. In the first 
nine months after the Taliban's opium ban, 83% of Afghanistan's opium was 
grown in the northern province of Badakhshan, mostly under Alliance 
control. As a new Afghan government is assembled, Washington and the UN are 
anxious to have a commitment to ending the drug trade built into its 
charter, and much of the agricultural aid offered will be tied to crop 
substitution programmes. But much of that money may already be too late. 
Most Afghan farmers have already decided what to plant for next spring, 
poppies or winter wheat, and many have decided that opium is the most 
promising crop.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth