The U.S. will launch an offensive against Afghanistan’s illicit opium trade because its profits fund terror organization Al-Qa’ida, according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian.
While the cultivation of opium poppy seeds has long supplied Western countries with heroin and local warlords with authority and capital, it is only now that the suppression of the crop is being seen as an anti-terrorism action.
“It’s become more and more clear that the principal source of financing for Al-Qai’ida and the Taliban is Afghan drugs,” a “senior American official” told The Guardian in a report published on Monday.
However, Al-Qa’ida, regional warlords, and the Taliban have been involved in the opium trade for years, said Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a participant in several diplomatic and humanitarian missions to the country.
The only thing that has changed is that opium crops have increased, Gouttierre told The Media Line (TML). Moreover, despite the efforts of Western governments and the new Afghan regime to curtail production, the central government in Kabul does not have the capacity to control the trade beyond its immediate vicinity.
A report released last month by Afghanistan’s government and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stated that the country produces three-quarters of the world’s opium and, thus, is the world’s leader in production of the drug, which is the base ingredient for the recreational drug heroin and for morphine.
Output from the crops increased eight percent this year, according to the report. Furthermore, about 7% of Afghanistan’s population is currently involved in the industry.
In a news conference this week, Afghanistan’s agriculture minister said that Afghans will be prohibited from importing food and grain in order to stimulate local crops other than opium, according to news reports.
Afghan President Himad Karzai had previously imposed a ban on opium production.
However, this, along with other initiatives to stamp out the crop, is widely believed to have failed because opium poppy seeds constitute the most lucrative crop available to Afghan farmers.
The opium industry constitutes 50% of the country’s gross domestic product and traffickers are believed to have reaped $1.3 billion in 2002, according to the UNODC report.
The country’s Hilmand valley provides “exactly” the ideal conditions for the plant to grow in two yearly harvests, according to Gouttierre.
As an alternative to alternative crops, the U.S. reportedly plans to persuade a “moderate Muslim ally, either Turkey or a Balkan state” to implement a security structure that would complement an analogous Afghani force, The Guardian reported.
These forces would destroy the opium fields in the two-week window between growth seasons. Consequently, terrorist cells would be destroyed in addition to 25% of the crops, the Guardian source stated.
Gouttierre believes that the security situation in Afghanistan will make this plan impossible.
“Until security is established in Afghanistan, [any anti-drug] operation will be spotty at best,” he said.
Thus, only when profitable alternative crops are proposed to farmers will cause the industry to wane, Gouttierre said.
Afghans would embrace a viable alternative as drug production is against Muslim law, he said. However, Gouttierre contended that Al-Qa’ida members find comfort in believing that they are “undermining the West by making it available [there].”
Al-Qa’ida and the Taliban is involved in the “second tier” of the drug trade, collecting the raw seeds and sometimes converting them into drugs before selling them to transporters or dealers abroad, Gouttierre said.
The most common destinations for the finished product are London, Moscow and the French port city Marseilles via neighboring central Asia, Turkey and Iran.