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Officials say poppies undermine democracy { April 2 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghandrug2apr02,1,4806342.story?coll=la-headlines-worldhttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghandrug2apr02,1,4806342.story?coll=la-headlines-world
THE WORLD
U.S. Officials Call for More Efforts to Curb Afghan Opium
They say a bumper crop of poppies threatens to feed the drug trade and undermine democracy in the war-torn nation.
By Sonni Efron
Times Staff Writer
April 2, 2004
WASHINGTON — Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation has soared, and this year's harvest could be twice as large as last year's near-record crop unless eradication efforts are stepped up immediately, a State Department official said Thursday.
The heroin business is "almost definitely" filling the coffers of fighters for the ousted Taliban government and Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin, another Afghan extremist group linked to Osama bin Laden, and "possibly" enriching Al Qaeda fighters as well, said Robert L. Charles, assistant secretary of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
In rare and carefully muted criticism of America's top ally, Charles said British authorities had not done enough to eradicate poppies in their sector in southern Afghanistan. He warned that failure to stop the bumper harvest, which had already begun in some areas because of unusually warm weather, would have devastating consequences not only for the global drug trade but also for Afghan democracy.
"This is crunch time in Afghanistan," Charles told a congressional panel. "The first crop is coming very rapidly…. We will pay a price later if we don't act right now."
The Defense Department also must do more to crack down on drug production in Afghanistan, said Rep. Mark E. Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources.
"The American people aren't pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan to watch it turn into a heroin poppy nation … and an undemocratic narco-terrorist-controlled state," Souder said.
Ninety percent of the heroin on European streets comes from Afghan poppies, while 7% to 10% of the heroin in the United States is believed to originate from that source. Souder noted that 20,000 Americans die each year from illegal drug use, compared with the 3,000 who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Charles said cutting the opium flow was central to fighting terrorism and preventing drug traffickers from undermining the fledgling Afghan democracy.
"Just as you cannot build a castle … on sand, you cannot build a democracy that will last any amount of time on heroin," he said.
His statements came a day after Afghan officials, at a donors conference in Berlin, pleaded for international help to stop drug production. President Hamid Karzai warned that drugs were "undermining the very existence of the Afghan state."
The congressional hearing Thursday was hastily scheduled after the United Nations and the Afghan government released a gloomy assessment Wednesday on Afghan opium. The report found that farmers planted poppies on a larger scale than in 2003, when opium production was the second-highest on record and brought Afghanistan an estimated $2.3 billion — a figure equal to half the country's legitimate gross domestic product. In some areas, up to 80% of families were believed to have planted the crop.
As of February, "there were generally no reports of eradication activities," and some farmers said they would fight to protect their fields, the U.N. said.
Charles praised Britain as an ally and said there was "no daylight" between top U.S. and U.K. leaders on Afghan drug policy.
But Charles said that lower-level British officials were not being aggressive enough in eradication. He blamed "misguided sympathy" for subsistence Afghan farmers whose poppies were almost ready for harvest and who had no alternative development assistance, as well as "a preoccupation with avoiding any possibility of resistance."
A British official downplayed any rift, saying the British have been pushing eradication as fast as possible but noting that the effort must be sustainable.
"There's no point in doing eradication in areas that will just give you a bigger problem the next year, with increased [planting] or security problems," the official said.
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