Opium
Trade Booms In Afghanistan
By Colin Brown
and Andrew Clennell
28 July 2004
The Independent
The opium harvest in Afghanistan this
year will be one of the biggest on record, the Foreign Office said yesterday,
and it has triggered a flood of heroin on Britain's streets.
The revelation will
prove highly embarrassing for Tony Blair, who cited cutting the supply
of heroin as one of the main reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan
in October 2001, in addition to removing the Taliban regime and rooting
out al-Qa'ida from the training camps run by Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban had
cracked down on drugs cultivators but the regime's fall led to an increase
in production and this year's harvest will be the largest since the
invasion.
Health workers warned
yesterday that the consequences of the rise were already evident: cheaper,
better quality heroin was arriving in Britain, luring thousands more
youngsters into addiction than ever before.
At the time of the
invasion, Mr Blair said: "We act because the al-Qa'ida network
and the Taliban regime are funded in large parts on the drugs trade
90 per cent of all heroin sold in Britain originates from Afghanistan.
Stopping that trade is directly in our interests."
He also told the
Labour Party conference on 2 October: "The arms the Taliban are
buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying
their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime
that we should seek to destroy."
The Foreign Office
revelation about the heroin crop, on the eve of the publication of the
Foreign Affairs Select Committee's long-awaited report on Afghanistan,
underscores the failure to meet a crucial policy objective. It is a
severe embarrassment to the Prime Minister, who has long faced criticism
over his professed grounds for war in the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
The Foreign Affairs
Select Committee will record its fears over the rising heroin production
tomorrow. As The Independent reported two months ago, members of the
committee returned from a fact-finding mission to the country dismayed
at what they had witnessed. Eric Illsley, a Labour member of the select
committee, described Afghanistan as "a basket case".
Members believe
that large areas of Afghanistan are back under the rule of warlords,
controlling militias of up to 10,000 men, which are paid for by the
profits of the illegal heroin trade.
MPs from all sides
last night accused the Government of complacency and said the Prime
Minister was betraying his clear promises to reduce opium production
after the invasion of Afghanistan.
David Davis, the
shadow Home Secretary, said: "British youngsters are dying for
Blair's incompetence. If we cannot do the job, we should not have undertaken
the task.''
David Chidgey, a
Liberal Democrat MP and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said:
"This is scandalous. This is a key fact that we picked up on our
visit to Afghanistan.
"Nato is not
coming across with the resources it promised. It is a great concern
to me that the poppy harvest has increased. They must find a way of
persuading the farmers to switch back to wheat or cereal, but they earn
five times as much by growing the poppy."
Details of the rise
in opium production emerged in a parliamentary written reply to the
Labour MP Harry Cohen from the Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell.
Mr Rammell said:
"The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is in the
process of assessing the 2004 harvest in conjunction with the Afghan
government. Its report will be published in the autumn. We expect to
see a rise in levels of cultivation.
"This is unwelcome
but experience of counter-narcotics policies in Pakistan and Thailand,
which both had much lower initial levels of production and were more
stable countries, shows that cultivation tends to increase before declining."
Mr Cohen said: "The
rise in cultivation and production of opium poppies in Afghanistan has
horrendous portents for us in the UK bearing in mind the PM's statement
that 90 per cent of heroin sold on British streets comes from Afghanistan.
"The claim
that cultivation tends to increase before declining gives no comfort
and ... is not necessarily the case. It seems to me a hope more akin
to peeing in the wind."
Sue Clark, manager
of the team that tackles substance abuse for the London homeless charity,
St Mungo's, said last night: "Our concern is that more drugs on
the streets will create more problems for the vulnerable people who
we work with daily.
"It makes our
job to get them further away from the streets and to get them help much
harder."
David Chater, a
spokesman for the social care charity Turning Point, said an increase
in poppy production could mean lower heroin prices and make life tougher
for people trying to treat addicts.
"From a treatment
point of view it's obviously a bad thing if much more heroin is available,"
he said.
"Both police
activities and treatment programmes have to be going well to make an
impact. The Government's invested quite a lot in the treatment side,
[but] this is going to pose problems for them on the supply side, the
police activity side."
In June, Nato agreed
to deploy an extra 1,200 troops to Afghanistan after its summit in Istanbul.
The troops were deployed to help provide security for the forthcoming
elections in September.
The country is struggling
to maintain a democratic veneer, amid sporadic violence, but meanwhile,
the strength of the heroin trade shows no sign of being cut back.