Opium seizures in
Afghanistan
soared 924 percent last year because of better cooperation between
Afghan and international forces, the top U.S. drug enforcement official
said Thursday.
The
Taliban
largely funds its insurgency by profits from the opium trade, making it
a growing target of U.S. and Afghan anti-insurgency operations.
Afghanistan produces the raw opium used to make 90 percent of the
world's heroin.
The
U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration now has 96 agents in the country
who joined with Afghan counterparts and NATO forces in more than 80
combined operations last year, acting DEA administrator Michelle
Leonhart said at a
news
conference in Kabul.
"That is the success of bringing the elements, civil,
military Afghan partners together," Leonhart said.
Leonhart did not give figures for total amounts of
drugs seized but said the increase was 924 percent between 2008 and
2009. International groups estimate that only about 2 percent of
Afghanistan's drug production was blocked from leaving the country in
2008 for markets in
Central
Asia and Europe.
The booming drugs trade has compounded Afghanistan's
many problems and deepened Western concern about the war-battered
country's future and hopes it can emerge as a peaceful democracy.
In a sign of President Hamid Karzai's increasingly
tetchy relations with key international allies, the Afghan leader on
Thursday accused U.N. and
European
Union officials of interfering in last year's flawed
presidential elections.
A day after the parliament rejected his revised
election law, Karzai accused the officials of committing "vast fraud" in
the disputed Aug. 20 ballot to push the election into a runoff.
Karzai singled out former U.N. deputy chief Peter
Galbraith, who was fired in a dispute with his boss about how to deal
with fraud allegations, and the head of the E.U. observers, retired
French general Philippe
Morillon.
Karzai was forced into a runoff after a U.N.-backed
commission threw out nearly a third of his ballots, but it was scrapped
when Karzai's main opponent dropped out. He then issued a decree giving
him greater control over the official election fraud watchdog body which
was turned down by parliament's lower house.
Karzai was installed for a second five-year term but
his government remains weak as it faces a challenge from a resurgent
Taliban.
Since the fall of the former Taliban regime in 2001
until 2007, the illegal cultivation of
opium poppies skyrocketed. It has since
started to decline, and the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has
forecast that opium production could drop again in 2010.
Opium exports dropped from an estimated $3.4 billion
in 2008, to $2.8 billion in 2009, the UNODC said. That represented a
fall in opium's share of Afghanistan's gross domestic product from about
one third to one quarter.
Leonhart said eradication efforts had already scored
some success in the south, with opium cultivation down more than 30
percent in Helmand province that is responsible for half of
Afghanistan's total
production.
She said the DEA was working with U.S. forces moving
into the Taliban heartland, including "significant operations" in
Helmand, where the poppy harvest season is in full-swing.
"There is a very good plan put together to have very
robust interdiction operations going forward there, eventually moving
that to other provinces in the south," Leonhart said.
Such operations place the Afghan government and its
foreign allies in a bind because eradicating
poppy fields risks driving angry farmers,
for whom
opium poppy
is a cheap, hardy, low-risk crop, into the arms of the insurgents
because they fear loss of their livelihood.
Efforts to replace opium with other crops such as
wheat and vegetables haven't scored wide success because profits for the
farmers are much lower than for poppies.
Leonhart gave no details of the strategy for the south, but stressed
that the focus was not on farmers but on seizing drugs and weapons,
arresting traffickers, and tracing the profits of the trade.
"Because the money is what fuels the insurgency," Leonhart said.
In a sign that traffickers are striking back against such efforts, 13
people were killed Wednesday when a bomb concealed on a bicycle exploded
near a crowd gathered to receive free vegetable seeds provided by the
British government as part of a program to encourage them not to plant
opium poppy.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, although the acting
provincial head of agriculture, Ghulam Sahki, said the blast could have
been the work of drug dealers trying to stop the alternative crop
program.
A recent NATO operation that drove militants from the
Helmand town of Marjah
struck at the heart of the
Taliban opium business. While troops
discovered acres (hectares) of poppy fields and numerous opium packing
operations, farmers were left alone.
Also Thursday, India announced it was suspending teaching and aid
operations in Kabul for two or three months following a February bomb
attack that killed six Indian staff. Similar Indian aid efforts in four
other Afghan cities remained up and running, said Indian Embassy
spokesman J.P. Singh.
The Taliban have long opposed India's involvement in
Afghanistan because of
its ties to the Afghan group that helped the U.S. oust the Islamist
regime in late 2001.
A mine blast Thursday morning in Shajoy district in the eastern province
of Zabul killed two civilians and injured three, the Interior Ministry
said. It blamed the attack on the Taliban.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
