Afghanistan disagrees with US over Poppy Eradication

This article ignores the fact that the Taliban had reduced the opium crop dramatically while they were in power and had even been rewarded for doing so by no less personage than Colin Powell. While some drug money no doubt funds the Taliban a great deal no doubt funds many warlord and other friends of the Karzai government. I have appended an article showing that under the Taliban opium production declined from 70 percent of world production to about 10 per cent.

Afghanistan at Odds With U.S. on Plan to Eradicate Opium Crop Janine Zacharia
Wed Aug 8, 2:57 PM ET



Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Afghanistan is at odds with a U.S. strategy to stem opium production that is funding the Taliban and other militants opposed to President Hamid Karzai's rule, according to a top Afghan diplomat.

While the Bush administration is seeking to expand efforts to destroy opium poppy plants, Afghanistan wants to emphasize long-term crop substitution.

``We think it's better to put more resources on preventing cultivation because once it's cultivated, it's too late,'' said Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., in an interview yesterday. ``You eradicate it, you lose the support of the people.''

The debate over how to counter Afghanistan's burgeoning production of opium, the raw material for heroin sold on European streets, is likely to sharpen tomorrow with the release of a U.S. drug-fighting strategy.

``Right now the approach of the United States is more emphasis on eradication,'' Jawad said. ``But not only us, your friends the British do not agree with that either, and say no, that's not the right approach.''

Jawad stressed that rather than ``punishing extensively the farmers, we have to go after traffickers.''

President George W. Bush and Karzai discussed the problem when they met Aug. 6 at Camp David in Maryland.

`Watching, Measuring'

Bush, with Karzai at his side, said the Afghan leader understands that farmers must be given the incentive to ``grow crops other than poppy and that he knows full well the United States is watching, measuring and trying to help eradicate poppy cultivation.''

William Wood, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said in late June that ``there is not yet a consensus regarding eradication.'' He lamented last year's results -- about 20,000 hectares (30,000 acres) or 10 percent of the total Afghan crop eliminated. Wood was ambassador to Colombia while the U.S. mounted a major effort there to shrink cocaine production.

``As a result, we are exploring new techniques that we will coordinate with the government of Afghanistan and the international community,'' Wood said in a statement posted on the U.S. Embassy's Web site.

In Colombia, the U.S. funded the spraying of herbicides on coca fields by crop dusters protected by helicopter-backed military forces. The Colombians also use the more labor- intensive approach of pulling up plants by their roots.

The anti-drug effort, known as Plan Colombia, is aimed at curbing the flow of drug money to guerrillas and strengthening the authority of the elected government.

Raising the Stakes

Ambassador Thomas Schweich, U.S. counter-narcotics coordinator in Afghanistan, told a conference in Washington two weeks ago that eradication would be pursued in places where alternatives to opium poppies are available. He said research shows that about a quarter of the poppy crop needs to be destroyed in such areas to deter farmers from planting it the next year.

``When they see they got a one in four chance of losing everything, they'll start thinking about taking the alternative that was developed,'' he said, according to a recording of his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Schweich said other steps, including interdiction of opium and a campaign to inform the public about drug-terrorism ties would be needed.

Failed Efforts

A U.S. government assessment of its counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan, released on July 31 by the inspectors general of the State and Defense departments, illustrated what a failure the U.S. effort has been to date.

During fiscal year 2006, the U.S. spent more than $420 million combating Afghan narcotics. Still, the number of Afghans involved in cultivation grew to 2.9 million from 2 million in 2005, equivalent to an eighth of the population.

Acreage devoted to poppy cultivation in 2006 was about 59 percent higher than in 2005. In 2006, income generated inside Afghanistan from the narcotics industry represented about 60 percent as much as that from legal economic activities.

``It is self-evident that there is no politically feasible way to outspend economic incentives that drive the narcotics trade,'' the inspectors general said. If the entire poppy crop were converted to heroin, its street value would be $38 billion, they estimated.

A State Department report earlier this year described a relationship in which traffickers supply weapons and money to the Taliban in exchange for the protection of drug trade routes and poppy fields.

The consequences are stark for the U.S. efforts to weaken al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the report said.

``Without an effective'' counter-narcotics effort, ``the corrupting influence of the narcotics industry would likely set the stage for Afghanistan's reemergence as a safe haven for international terrorist operations,'' the inspectors general said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Janine Zacharia in Washington at jzacharia@bloomberg.net .

Here is a post from this site.
. In fact Colin Powell had presented the Taliban a check for its role in reducing production not long before the Taliban was ousted!

Only last month, US and United Nations drug watchers had pronounced Myanmar, a Southeast Asian military dictatorship, as 2001's world champion opium producer, responsible for 865 tons of the heroin precursor last year, according to the State Department's Annual Survey of Opium Cultivation and Production. Although Myanmar's production declined by more than 200 tons from 2000, the Taliban ban on Afghan opium production allowed the Burmese to creep into first place. Afghan production last year was an estimated 185 tons, down more than 90% from the more than 3,200 tons harvested in 2000, according to a recent UN International Drug Control Program estimate. (The estimate is contained in the 2001 Afghanistan Annual Opium Poppy Survey, online at http://www.undcp.org/pakistan/report_2001-10-16_1.pdf in the agency's Pakistan-area web site.)

"Afghanistan has gone from producing 70% of the world's opium to less than 10%," UNDCP chief researcher Dr. Sandeep Chawla told a London conference in October.

Even as Chawla was spreading the good news, though, Afghan farmers were taking advantage of the fall of the Taliban and the new government's preoccupation with establishing itself to replant poppy fields they had torn up under Taliban orders last year. Farmers in Northern Alliance-controlled Badakshan province never stopped planting and were responsible for the bulk of the Afghan crop this year. But according to on-the-scene reports from late December in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe, farmers in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the Afghan southwest and Nangahar province in the east had begun planting again even as American bombs fell in October and November. Now the young plants with their tiny green leaves are visible from major highways and in plain view on the outskirts of Jalalabad, the eastern administrative capital for the new government and staging area for the US and Afghan assault on the nearby Tora Bora cave complexes