Only two days after his inauguration, President Hamid Karzai is already trying to get the message out — Afghanistan needs to stem its booming drugs trade if the country is going to move forward.
With the ink barely dry after his swearing in, Karzai has called a two-day meeting of tribal elders and provincial officials from around Afghanistan to discuss strategies to combat the drugs trade.
”Our principal promises concern the strengthening of the security sector and ensuring lasting stability throughout the country, the elimination of poppy cultivation and the fight against the processing and trafficking of drugs,” President Karzai told assembled Afghan dignitaries at his inauguration on Tuesday.
Afghanistan is now the source of 87% of the world’s opium and the origin of 90% of the heroin on the streets of Europe, according to a recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Poppy cultivation is now the main engine of Afghanistan’s economic growth — producing 60% of GDP — and binds together previously quarrelsome local communities, the report said.
With most of Afghanistan’s great and good still in Kabul after attending the president’s inauguration, Karzai is taking advantage of their presence to set out the government’s strategy on reversing the tide, but it will not be easy.
”There are warlords involved, high government officials, police commanders, governors are involved. We have to reform our judicial system and put big culprits behind bars, otherwise going after poor farmers we will fill our prisons but still the drug business will be going on,” said Mirwais Yasini, head of Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics directorate.
Many of those involved will meet with Karzai over the coming two days and will thrash out their concerns with the president, and discuss the thorny problem of forcing 2,3-million Afghan farmers to take a huge cut in income.
Opium cultivation has surged more than 64% over the last year according to the UNODC but for ordinary farmers it has meant food on the table and the chance for their children to get an education.
After 25 years of war, Afghanistan has no infrastructure to transport goods to market and farmers can earn over 10 times more growing opium than cultivating fruit, vegetables or other cash crops.
”There are amazing parallels with Colombia and Bolivia where ordinary farmers are forced into growing opium or coca because there is no economic alternative,” said a westerner working on counter-narcotics in Kabul.
”There are no roads to get their products to market and they have to put food on the table,” he added.
After this year’s surge in production, the United States has finally got tough on earmarking about $780-million to combat narcotics in Afghanistan over the next year after three years of focusing on fighting the Taliban in the country’s troubled south.
Only around $120-million of that sum though will be funnelled into providing alternative livelihoods for farmers and widespread eradication could lead to instability if not managed properly.
With parliamentary elections scheduled for next spring, there are fears that local rivalries could flare into violence.
If the parliamentary elections are to go successfully, both ”the Afghan government and the international community need to put in more resources and make more progress in the next few months on improving security, cutting down the power of the warlords and attacking the spreading influence of the drugs trade,” said a report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. – Sapa-AFP