U.S. Report Warns that Afghan Drug Trade Threatens "World Stability"
Wednesday, March 9, 2005 at 05:35AM
TheSpook
Heroin production in Afghanistan
represents "an enormous threat to world stability," and the country is
"on the verge of becoming a narcotics state," the State Department said
in a report released yesterday. Despite steps by the Afghan government
and foreign donors, the U.S. International Narcotics Control Strategy
Report said that the Afghan "narcotics situation continues to worsen"
more than three years after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban
government. The report said Colombia has made "impressive progress"
against the drug trade but remains a major producer, and that
traffickers continue to move drugs through Peru -- the second-largest
cocaine producer, after Colombia. The most dramatic conclusions in the
report, an annual survey of the world drug trade, were about
Afghanistan, where it praised President Hamid Karzai's efforts but said
Afghan poppy cultivation more than tripled last year. "Afghanistan's
illicit opium/heroin production can be viewed, for all practical
purposes, as the rough equivalent of world illicit heroin production,
and it represents an enormous threat to world stability," it said. The
area devoted to poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose to 510,756 acres
last year from 150,731 acres in 2003. Citing International Monetary
Fund estimates that drugs account for 40 percent to 60 percent of the
Afghan economy, the report added: "Afghanistan is on the verge of
becoming a narcotics state." The report said Afghan political
conditions improved last year, but "criminal financiers and narcotics
traffickers in and outside of Afghanistan take advantage of the ongoing
instability." [more]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.