Pubdate: Mon, 22 Apr 2002
Source: Christian Science Monitor (US)
Copyright: 2002 The Christian Science Publishing Society
Contact:  http://www.csmonitor.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/83
Author: Martha Brill Olcott
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

AFGHAN DRUG TRADE: TERROR IN THE WINGS

WASHINGTON - The United States is scoring a major victory against 
terrorism in the war in Afghanistan, but until the US successfully 
tackles that country's drug-trafficking problem it cannot call the 
victory permanent.

Drug dealers and arms traders are natural allies; their presence in 
Afghanistan and throughout Central Asia undermines already-weak 
states and gives militant Islamic groups the means for self-financing.

Afghanistan has been the world's largest grower of poppies for opium 
and heroin, largely destined for sale in Europe. Though cultivation 
was banned briefly by the Taliban, Afghan drug dealers are back in 
business.

US bombing raids never directly targeted Afghanistan's drug-storage 
or heroin-producing facilities, and Afghanistan's drug dealers were 
fast off the mark, distributing seed or cash to purchase it in the 
fall. They are now primed to buy up the crop, and are inciting local 
farmers to oppose violently the government's efforts to seize it.

Meanwhile, there is still no US strategy to deal with Afghanistan's 
return to narco-trafficking and only a trickle of assistance money in 
the pipeline to counter it. The US timetable for rebuilding 
Afghanistan must coincide with the way in which risks are generated 
and not merely be fashioned after Washington's annual budget cycle.

Unless the growing opium and heroin trade from Afghanistan through 
Central Asia is curbed, anti-state groups will continue to have a 
ready source of funding, including groups in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai has banned opium-growing, but 
lacks the money and capacity to enforce his policy successfully. Most 
local warlords still profit from narco-trafficking by taxing the crop 
or its transit. Until a national military and police force is 
trained, Afghanistan must rely on outsiders to enforce the ban, or 
see it largely ignored.

Current US policy ensures that the latter will be the case, or worse, 
that the ban will help destabilize the Karzai government, since the 
Bush administration opposes the creation of a large international 
security force, whose mandate spans all of Afghanistan.

Tolerating the rebirth of the drug trade transforms the tragedy of 
Afghanistan's poverty into a problem of regional and eventually 
global security. One should not minimize how difficult it would be to 
cut drug protection sharply in Afghanistan. The network of drug 
dealers is fully intertwined with the traditional local elite. No 
crop will produce the same income, nor allow a rapacious elite the 
same easy riches.

Working with the provisional government, the US should work 
aggressively to halt poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. 
Crop-substitution projects must gain priority; Afghan farmers should 
be offered reasonable cash subsidies for destroying the harvest in 
the field, or for turning it over for destruction. Those who comply 
should qualify for agricultural reform programs, while those who 
refuse should lose priority for receiving all forms of development 
assistance.

Alongside the provisional government, the US should also destroy 
current stores of opium and then close down heroin factories. 
Warlords allied with the US's Afghan military effort must pledge to 
remain "drug free," the US must devote the intelligence resources to 
monitoring this.

Otherwise, the US may wind up being the inadvertent regulator of the 
very drug trade that it should be stamping out, as US forces could 
have to adjudicate between feuding warlords.

Although some funds were recently allocated for eradicating the 
current crop, the US approach emphasizes interdiction on Central 
Asia's borders, since more than half of Afghan drugs exit into those 
states. But current allocations and their promised supplements meet a 
fraction of these countries' training needs. Tajikistan and 
Turkmenistan already qualify as "narco-states," as their governments 
have credibly been accused of sifting profits from the drug trade. 
And although Tajikistan's new national drug-control agency has 
sharply improved interdiction rates, funds for this UN-sponsored 
project run out this year.

Afghanistan's drug trade feeds on Central Asia's poverty. Without 
concerted action, these fragile states' problems could fester just 
when the West is planning to tap Caspian oil and gas reserves =F1 
reserves whose delivery could be compromised by instability in this 
land-locked region.

The fight against terrorism cannot hope to succeed unless the US 
remains as alert to preventing tomorrow's terrorists from 
consolidating as it is to defeating the current threat. As in the 
other battlefields of the war on terror, the US must be prepared to 
deal a blow to the Afghan drug trade, even if Washington must assume 
a disproportionate share of the financial burden.

Martha Brill Olcott is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment 
for International Peace and author of 'Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled 
Promise' (Carnegie, 2002).
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