[ppi] [ppiindia] Heroin in Afghan veins

** ppi-india **
 Heroin in Afghan veins
         H.D.S. Greenway The Boston Globe  Monday, January 26, 2004




Opium nation

BOSTON When I arrived in Afghanistan last month, I expected to find a lack
of security, a resurgent Taliban, corruption, warlords, economic woes, and a
weak central government. I found all of that, but I came away thinking that
Afghanistan's most serious long-run problem is something quite different,
though closely related to all of the above: heroin.
.
The Taliban suppressed the opium poppy for a short time, but for Afghan
farmers opium is a crop that pays like no other, and more and more are now
turning to it. The danger to a weak and unstable state cannot be
overestimated.
.
"Provinces that never grew poppies are growing them now," said President
Hamid Karzai. "We have an excellent chance to have a legitimate economy, but
we will never have stability here if the economy is criminalized."
.
Afghanistan is now the world's largest producer of opium. It accounts for
about 40 percent of the Afghan economy, generating some $2 billion
annually - "equal to all the money we have for reconstruction," said Haneef
Atmar, minister for rural reconstruction and development. Opium has the
ability to finance not only the warlords, whom the government is trying to
co-opt and cajole into surrendering their power, but also the lurking
Taliban and even Al Qaeda.
.
Afghanistan is mostly in the wholesale opium business, with the heroin
refining and distribution going on in neighboring countries. But that is
changing, and about 85 percent of Afghan heroin stays in the region, experts
say, with only 15 percent reaching the West. Afghanistan itself has an
estimated one million addicts. "This is a disaster for us," Karzai says.
AIDS, that handmaiden of heroin use, is also on the increase.
.
"Everything could be threatened if the government doesn't take this
seriously," said Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who is now
Afghanistan's minister of finance. "The U.S. is not helpful. They say we can
be O.K. in 10 years, like Thailand, but if we wait 10 years there will be a
drug dealer sitting in my house."
.
The United States would like to be helpful but is of several minds. The
military doesn't want to touch the problem, saying there is no point in
alienating the countryside by getting into the drug eradication business
until the U.S. troops there can get on top of the security problem. But
there are civilians in the American embassy who fear that the Afghans "are
in danger of losing their country" to drug dealers, that a situation like
Colombia's could evolve. Even if the United States were to assist in ridding
the country of only 20 percent of the opium crop, one American argued, that
would "send a signal that drugs dealers can't act with impunity here."
.
Afghan leaders in the provinces warn that it is no good destroying opium
unless there is something to replace the farmers' lost income, that
too-sudden eradication without a moneymaking crop replacement would be
destabilizing. The British, who under the Bonn agreement for international
cooperation in Afghan reconstruction are in charge of antinarcotics
programs, agree, but no one has come up with a crop as lucrative as opium.
.
Afghans complain that an earlier British effort to buy some of the crop
backfired because when word got out farmers who had been growing food
switched over to opium hoping for buyouts. American donations of wheat to
Afghanistan also backfired, making it more difficult for Afghan farmers to
sell their wheat at a profit and encouraging more opium growing, Afghans
say.
.
The Bush administration was quick to declare victory in Afghanistan so that
it could clear the decks for the invasion of Iraq. But the war is not yet
won in Afghanistan. Security continues to deteriorate, and to succeed the
United States and the international community are going to have to stay
involved for another seven to 10 years.
.
International donors and U.S. taxpayers will be less likely to support
Afghanistan if it evolves into a narco-state. That should worry the United
States, not just Afghanistan.
.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.


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