Afghan opium busts hit record
Source: Agencies |
April 2, 2010, Friday
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OPIUM seizures in Afghanistan soared 924 percent last year because of better cooperation between Afghan and international forces, the top United States drug enforcement official said yesterday.
The Taliban largely funds the insurgency by profits from the opium trade, making it a growing target of US and Afghan anti-insurgency operations. Afghanistan produces raw opium used to make 90 percent of the world's heroin.
The US 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 in Kabul.
"That is the success of bringing the elements, civil, military Afghan partners together," Leonhart said.
She 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 Central Asia and Europe.
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 US forces moving into the Taliban heartland, including "significant operations" in Helmand. "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.
Leonhart gave no details of the strategy, but stressed that the focus was on seizing drugs and weapons, arresting traffickers, and tracing profits.
Such operations place the Afghan government and its allies in a bind because eradicating poppy fields risks driving farmers, for whom opium is a cheap, 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 have failed because profits for farmers are much lower .
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