Afghan opium production started with the US-backed overthrow of the secular Afghan Government in 1978 and grew steadily with the consequent civil war, the Russian invasion and the US-backed religious-based resistance.

 

Afghan opium production increased further after the departure of the Russians. However in 2000, several years after they captured Kabul, the Taliban banned opium production, slashing Afghan opium production from about 76% of word production in 2000 to 6% in 2001.

Within a year of the US Alliance invasion the Afghan opium production skyrocketed from 6% of world production in 2001, to 74% in 2002, 93% in 2006, 95% in 2007 and 94% in 2008.

 

According to Glenn Greenway, the Drug Truth Network reported September 15, 2008, "Afghan heroin output has increased a staggering 5,000% since the US invasion 7 years ago." I would guess this percentage is even larger today.

UN Secretary General Ban ki-moon said recently at an international conference in Vienna, that Afghanistan will never be stable unless it tackles its drug problem.

 

In 2007, Afghanistan supplied 93% of the world's opium, according to the U.S. State Department. Illicit poppy production, meanwhile, brings $4 billion into Afghanistan, or more than half the country’s total economy of $7.5 billion, according to the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC).  It also represents about half of the economy of Pakistan, and of the ISI in particular.

 

Destroying the labs has always been an obvious option, but for years America refused to do so for political reasons. In 2001 the Taliban and bin Laden were estimated by the CIA to be earning up to 10 per cent of Afghanistan’s drug revenues, then estimated at between 6.5 and 10 billion U.S. dollars a year. This income of perhaps $1 billion was less than that earned by Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, parts of which had become the key to the drug trade in Central Asia. The UN Drug Control Program (UNDCP) estimated in 1999 that the ISI made around $2.5 billion annually from the sale of illegal drugs.

 

At the start of the US offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies.”  Rashid was “told by UNODC officials that the Americans knew far more about the drug labs than they claimed to know, and the failure to bomb them was a major setback to the counter-narcotics effort."

 

Donald Rumsfeld

 

Thanks primarily to the CIA-backed anti-Soviet campaign of the 1980s, Afghanistan today is a drug-corrupted and heroin-ravaged society from the heads of state all the way down to the junkies on the streets.

Governing Afghans are likely to become involved in the drug traffic, sooner or later, just as the FARC in Colombia and the Communist Party in Myanmar have evolved in time from revolutionary movements into drug-trafficking organizations.

 

Afghan President Hamid Karza

The situation in Pakistan is not much different. The US mainstream media have never mentioned the February 23 report in the London Sunday Times and that Asif Ali Zardari, now the Pakistani Prime Minister, was once caught in a DEA drug sting.

 

Important as heroin may have become to the Afghan and Pakistani political economies, the local proceeds are only a small share of the global heroin traffic. According to the UN, the ultimate value in world markets in 2007 of Afghanistan’s $4 billion opium crop was about $110 billion: this estimate is probably too high, but even if the ultimate value was as low as $40 billion, this would mean that 90 percent of the profit was earned by forces outside of Afghanistan.

 

It has been estimated that 80 percent or more of the profits from the traffic are reaped in the countries of consumption. The UNODC Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, has reported that “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”

Since the time of invasion of Afghanistan, the Opium production is given a boost by United States and its powered Afghan government. Hamid Karzai and his clan are heavily involved in this business. This being understood, they have taken measures to cultivate Opium, provided support for trafficking with Tajikistan in a legal way and this has resulted as an increase in use of Opium around the globe and has especially hit Russia and Europe.

In the years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan Russia has been flooded with heroin. The drug has crept along a trail stretching from Afghanistan through Tajikistan and other Central Asian nations and over the Russian border, turning the country into the world's top consumer of heroin, the Russian government says.

The drug has spread like fire through a country uniquely unqualified to cope with its dangers: Narcotics were largely absent during Soviet times, and most people are still unaware of the risk of heroin addiction, even as an estimated 83 Russians a day die by overdosing on the drug, official statistics show. Russia estimates that one in every 50 people of working age is addicted to heroin. South Wales has seen a jump of 180% in heroin addiction rates since the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2008, the EU estimated that a young European died every hour from a drug overdose.

Email: tomretterbush@gmail.com

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