Afghanistan sets opium record

Afghanistan sets opium record
By Fisnik Abrashi
Associated Press
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published August 17, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels--up nearly 40 percent from 2005--despite hundreds of millions of dollars in counternarcotics money, Western officials said.

The increase could have repercussions for an already grave security situation, with drug lords joining the Taliban-led fight against Afghan and international forces.

A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season--up from 257,000 acres in 2005--citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

"It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity.

The UN said last year that Afghanistan produced an estimated 4,500 tons of opium, enough to make 450 tons of heroin.

This year's preliminary findings indicate a failure in attempts to eradicate poppy cultivation and continuing corruption among provincial officials and police, problems acknowledged by President Hamid Karzai. Karzai told Fortune magazine in a recent interview that "lots of people" in his administration profited from the narcotics trade and that he had underestimated the difficulty of eradicating opium production.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that opium accounted for 52 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2005.

"Now what they have is a narco-economy. If they do not get corruption sorted they can slip into being a narco-state," the U.S. official warned.

Opium cultivation has surged since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001. The former regime enforced an effective ban on poppy growing by threatening to jail farmers, virtually eradicating the crop in 2000. But Afghan and Western counternarcotics officials say Taliban-led militants are now implicated in the drug trade.

In military action Wednesday, U.S. and Afghan forces raided compounds suspected of being Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Khost province in southeastern Afghanistan, seizing weapons and explosives and arresting eight people, the U.S. military said.

Meanwhile, insurgent mortars hit a Canadian base in southern Afghanistan, wounding six soldiers, a Canadian military spokesman said.