U.S. Offers Take on Afghan Opium Boom

Sept. 2, 2006 — -- The State Department moved in advance to pre-empt a United Nations report released today by acknowledging the international organization's finding that there has been a "significant" increase in Afghan poppy harvesting, the key crop of the opium and heroin trades.

Today, the United Nations announced Afghanistan's opium cultivation rose 60 percent this year, according to The Associated Press. Opium is used to make heroin.

The State Department Friday would not yet give the report's exact numbers, but was clearly in damage limitation mode, keen to counter negative publicity in advance.

Saying that the "bad news" came as "no surprise," a senior official told reporters Thursday that the numbers reflect the 2005 crop, not the 2006 crop, which he expected to be lower.

Afghanistan is believed to be responsible for almost 90 percent of the world's heroin supply, generating approximately $2.7 billion for the country. An estimated $460 million of this goes to the poppy farmers themselves; the rest is believed to finance drug lords, warlords, and the growing Taliban insurgency.

When in power, the Taliban's ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam led it to crack down mercilessly on heroin production. The U.N. noted Afghanistan's poppy output in 2001, for instance, was negligible.

But now, there is increasing "anecdotal evidence" that the Taliban are "going where the money is" and using "narco funds," said Thomas Schweich, a State Department expert on international narcotics.

For example, the Afghan province with the highest poppy output -- the Helmand area -- is a Taliban stronghold. Although the U.S believes that only 8 to 10 percent of Afghan farmers are involved in poppy cultivation, the Helmand province is the source of up to half of the world's heroin.

That may be changing though, as this year an Afghan government force reportedly wiped out over 6,000 acres of Helmand poppy fields. According to Schweich, this has had a "positive psychological impact" on the province by proving it was not beyond the reach of the central government, based in Kabul.

Operations such as this mean that 10 percent of 2006's poppy crop had been destroyed; an improvement on the mere four percent eradicated in 2005, when the current "multi-pillar" drugs strategy was started.