Author: Donna Leinwand, Toni Locy
and Vivienne Walt
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: October 17, 2001
As American bombers continue to
pound Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, US officials say the campaign
against the terrorist-friendly regime inevitably will target its biggest
moneymaker: a vibrant drug network that supplies more than 70 per cent
of the world's opium. Authorities in the USA and Europe already have frozen
an estimated $24 million in assets linked to Osama bin Laden, his Al-Qaeda
terrorist network and the Taliban. But the American-led effort is just
beginning to put a dent in a drug trade that US officials believe nets
the Taliban up to $30 million a year in taxes and tolls that it collects
from Afghan drug rings.
The opium continues to flow from
Afghanistan, US officials say, even though the Taliban last year vowed
to ban opium cultivation and to direct farmers toward crops that would
help feed millions who live in poverty. Taliban leaders declared that heroin,
which is derived from opium, was anti-Islam.
The United Nations estimates that
Afghanistan's opium crop seems to have dropped by more than 90 per cent
this year from the nearly 3,300 metric tons produced in 2000. But now the
Taliban either is unwilling or unable to enforce the opium ban, which US
and UN officials say appears to have been largely a ploy to drive up opium
prices by limiting the supply.
UN officials say that for the past
several years, Afghan drug rings have been stockpiling about 60 per cent
of their annual opium harvests. Those reserves, which intelligence sources
say were being held in at least 40 warehouses throughout Afghanistan earlier
this year, have been a financial safeguard for the Taliban.
Officials suspect the reserves also
have been part of an effort by the Taliban and drug groups to control heroin
prices worldwide, just as oil cartels manipulated crude prices in the 1970s.
If that was the Taliban's strategy,
it worked - for a while.
In July 2000, when the Taliban told
Afghan farmers to stop growing opium or risk execution, a kilogram of the
drug sold for about $44 wholesale, the U.N. says. A year later, a kilogram
cost $400. But since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the USA, opium prices
have plummeted and now are back below $100 per kg.
Still, street prices for heroin
across Europe have remained low, an indication that Afghanistan has probably
kept the supply of opium steady by releasing its reserves. US and UN analysts
say that Afghan drug rings now are dumping some opium reserves onto the
market in an effort to empty warehouses before U.S.-led air raids can destroy
them.
"When there is a war, everyone tries
to convert everything into cash," says Mohammad Fallah, head of the drug-control
program in neighbouring Iran, where anxious officials say the bombing in
Afghanistan is likely to create waves of opium smugglers trying to cross
the border.
Iran is a popular thoroughfare for
smugglers travelling from Afghanistan to western Europe, where officials
say most of the heroin on the streets originates in Afghanistan.
Analysts say the importance of drug
money to the Taliban offers U.S. officials the chance to launch a major
strike against the worldwide heroin trade as part of their anti-terrorism
campaign.
US officials "realise that the (drug)
money is critical" to the Taliban, says Neil Livingstone, author of several
books on terrorism and chairman of Global Options, an international risk
management company in Washington, D.C. "Afghanistan has no means of supporting
its military, except with opium (sales). Everyone recognises the need to
go after the opium."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has declined to say how or when US forces might do that.
"The heroin trade is ultimately
very important (to US anti-terrorism efforts) because it's a revenue source
for a very dangerous regime," says Asa Hutchinson, administrator of the
Drug Enforcement Administration. "Without curtailing the heroin trade,
you cannot succeed in Afghanistan."
An opium nation
In a rugged, mostly barren nation
of 27 million people that has been decimated by war, poverty and drought,
opium dominates not just the economy but everyday life. It is grown in
22 of Afghanistan's 30 provinces, and for struggling farmers across the
nation the poppy literally has been a lifesaver.
Opium has been in Afghanistan for
centuries, but became an economic force only after the end of Afghanistan's
10-year war with the Soviet Union in 1989.
That conflict, along with an ongoing
civil war, destroyed Afghanistan's crop irrigation system. Because opium
poppies require little water or maintenance and are in demand worldwide,
many food-producing farmers turned to the drug trade. That shut down much
of Afghanistan's already tenuous food supply chain.
Today, opium isn't just Afghanistan's
only significant cash crop - it's the dominant currency. Opium and its
derivatives made through chemical processing - heroin, morphine base and
opium gum - are traded for guns, food and shelter.
The footprints of the Afghan opium
trade can be seen throughout Asia and Europe.
Drug addiction is a growing problem
in Afghanistan, drug policy analysts say. In neighbouring Iran and Pakistan
border jails are filled with drug smugglers, and officials are struggling
to deal with an estimated 2.5 million addicts.
In Germany, Great Britain and elsewhere
in Europe, officials say Afghanistan is by far the leading source of heroin.
"We know the Taliban regime is largely
funded by the drug trade and that 90 per cent of the heroin on British
streets originates in Afghanistan," British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.
Because Afghanistan's opium trade
is such a menace to its neighbours, some officials in Europe and western
Asia are hoping that the US-led war on terrorism takes down the Afghan
drug trade along with the Taliban.
A US official said that given the
opium trade's importance to those who support terrorism, American forces
would be justified in spraying Afghan fields to kill opium poppies, and
in destroying stockpiles of opium or processed heroin. Such spraying could
be done in February, when the next crop of opium poppies begins to blossom.
(USA Today)
