Afghans face uphill battle to crush opium trade
They are the warriors in Afghanistan’s new war – a small team of specially-trained Afghan soldiers working with British advisers to attack opium smuggling which has flourished since the fall of the Taliban.
Everyone from visiting US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the United Nations says they face a very uphill battle, with opium production expected to reach a record high this year.
Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reviewed about 20 members of the unit at a US base in Jalalabad this week. At a news conference later in Kabul, Rumsfeld spoke of the importance of addressing the drug trade.
“It is a very dangerous thing,” he said. “To deal with it will require close cooperation among the government of Afghanistan and the international community and certainly the United States.”
The Jalalabad unit’s commander, Ahmad Khalid, says the group’s first operation took out a drug lab guarded by 15 armed men. He said they have eliminated 18 more labs.
Neither Khalid nor the unit’s adviser, a British army major who requested anonymity, would say how large the unit is.
Asked what motivates his team, Khalid spoke of “human feelings” that trump greed, including hatred of a drug trade that enriches criminals and warlords.
Khalid said his men were all volunteers. They are young, wear their hair short and bear serious expressions. Unlike many Afghan men, including many of the soldiers in Afghanistan’s new regular army, there isn’t a man on Khalid’s entire team who wears a beard. Under Taliban rule, men were forbidden to shave their beards.
The British military has taken the lead in the counternarcotics effort, working primarily as advisers to units like Khalid’s.
The Jalalabad-based counter-narcotics unit is in the middle of one of the richest poppy-growing regions in the country. But these units are too small and under-equipped to put a major dent in the drug trade.
For Afghan farmers, there’s no more profitable crop than poppies, the source of opium. For warlords and insurgents, there’s no better way to make a lot of money. Most heroin from Afghanistan goes to Europe and Russia.
The cultivation of opium poppies has resumed and flourished in Afghanistan since 2001. It was largely eliminated under the Taliban’s religious policing, but farmers have resumed cultivating and harvesting the profitable crop in the chaos since the fall of the Taliban.
UN surveys estimate Afghanistan accounted for three-quarters of the world’s opium last year, and the trade brought in €1.8bn, more than half of the nation’s gross domestic product.
New surveys suggest even more has been planted this year. Robert Charles, the State Department’s top counter-narcotics official, said Afghanistan may be on pace for a world record opium poppy crop this year.
