Heroin lab menace grows in Afghanistan
By Sananda Sahoo
WASHINGTON - Drug traffickers are increasing imports of precursor chemicals used for processing raw opium poppy in Afghanistan into heroin and morphine, according to a new United States State Department report released on Monday.
They are channeling the chemicals through new routes and diverting them from legal commerce and grey markets, said the State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2009. West Asia and Africa are the new key transshipment points to smuggle and divert chemicals.
''Trafficking throughout Afghanistan continues to be a big challenge," David Johnson, assistant secretary at the Bureau of
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said.
According to a survey of global counter-narcotics efforts, Afghanistan remains the world's top producer of opium despite a 22% decline in the area under poppy cultivation there during 2009. Historically, traffickers have exported raw opium produced in Afghanistan to other countries for processing into heroin and other opiates. In recent years, however, the country has emerged as one of the biggest producers of refined products.
Drug traffickers in Afghanistan deal in all forms of opiates, including unrefined opium, semi-refined morphine base and refined heroin.
The decrease in poppy cultivation has as much to do with economics as security, according to independent experts in the US. ''The decline is fueled by over-production of poppy which led to a lowering of prices,'' said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security expert with the Brookings Institution and author of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs. ''The market is saturated," she told Inter Press Service.
The increase in precursor chemicals coming into Afghanistan poses major challenges for the US and the international community's efforts to fight drug-trafficking. It suggests that traffickers intend to expand their refinery operations inside the war-torn country.
Under the administration of US President Barack Obama, Washington has altered its approach to tackling drug production in Afghanistan. The focus on eradication that prevailed for most of George W Bush's tenure has given way to greater emphasis on efforts to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers. It has renewed efforts to promote the production of alternative crops and livelihoods for farmers who are now growing poppies.
The new report cited the arrest of some major drug traffickers in Afghanistan over the past year. But it also suggested that authorities have had less success in disrupting Afghanistan's opium supply chain due to gaps in intelligence and limited international law enforcement expertise in detecting the chemicals.
The report also singled out Pakistan as a transit country for precursor chemicals, as well as for opiates and hashish destined not only for Afghanistan, but also global markets.
In September 2009, for example, prosecutors arrested a Korean suspect who attempted to smuggle 10 tonnes of acetic anhydride, the primary precursor for heroin, into Afghanistan with the help of Pakistani intermediaries suspected of having shipped 6.6 tonnes of acetic anhydride to Afghanistan earlier last year.
The change in US policy from eradication to rural development and interdiction can work well with Washington's overall counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan and lead to a sustainable reduction in drug economy, Felbab-Brown said.
Last year, Afghanistan produced more than 90% of the world's opium gum, the basic precursor to heroin, worth $2.8 billion. ''But how the two aspects of the policy are operationalized will determine their effectiveness," she said.
Russia does not agree with the US's policy shift. Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Control Service, said in an interview last week that this would flood Russia with heroin.
But Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reiterated that eradication worked against the larger purpose. ''We're focusing on high traffickers' interdiction and destroying drug bazaars, but that's a tactical difference [with Russia]," he said in Washington on Tuesday after completing a visit to Central and South Asia.
Interdiction has proved to be a difficult counter-drug tactic. It was effective at times, such as in Peru during the late 1990s, when smuggling was conducted by air. But in Afghanistan, smuggling is done over land. ''The border is a huge highway of illegal trade," Felbab-Brown said.
Border interdiction in Afghanistan is extremely difficult due to a lack of resources to protect its long, exceptionally rugged and unpopulated borders with Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.
Moreover, ''Internal interdiction is hard because so much of the terrain is not under government control," according to Felbab-Brown.
Many drug trafficking groups are not linked directly to the Taliban insurgency, which, according to US intelligence agencies, earns about $70 million a year from the drug trade. Some of the most important trafficking operations reportedly involve government officials and the police, while still others are independent and operate from outside Afghanistan, according to the report.
The Taliban have access to parts of the drug trade in Pakistan, but their access is limited. Nor does the group exercise control over smuggling channels and markets in Iran, Central Asia, Turkey, Europe and China.
''I am very skeptical that interdiction will be successful in stopping illicit flows,'' Felbab-Brown said. ''The goal of interdiction should be to prevent or minimize the corruption and coercive power of Taliban and government-linked traffickers and independent groups.''
Rural development is the administration's other important approach to combating the drug trade. ''But it takes a long time in Afghanistan, where challenges are greater than anywhere else in the world,'' Felbab-Brown said.
While northern Afghanistan has been far more secure than the southern and eastern border strongholds of the Taliban, rural development there has been slow in coming. In the north, marijuana is now competing with legal crops.
The principal sources of precursor chemicals are believed to be China, Europe, Central Asia and India. Traffickers hide the sources of their chemicals by repackaging or falsely labeling them, the report said. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, markets and processing facilities are clustered in border areas of Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
Drug laboratories process a large portion of the country's raw opium into heroin and morphine base, which reduces the bulk of the raw opium by about one-tenth, making it easier to smuggle across foreign borders.
Primary trafficking routes from Afghanistan run through Iran to Turkey and Western Europe, through Pakistan to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Iran, and through Central Asia to Russia.
Recent international interdiction efforts under the leadership of the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board have led to an increase in the number of large seizures in Afghanistan, the report said.
But Felbab-Brown said the flow of precursor chemicals is hard to measure. More seizures can indicate that interdiction efforts are working, but can also show that more is flowing into the country.
Washington, which currently has some 70,000 troops deployed against the Taliban in Afghanistan, has shifted from poppy eradication to a greater emphasis on interdiction and rural development, primarily to avoid antagonizing local farmers, Felbab-Brown said.
But the ongoing counter-insurgency operation centered on Marjah in Helmand province, a major poppy-production region, has included the confiscation of poppy seeds discovered by troops in house searches.
''And that is generating political capital for the Taliban," Felbab-Brown said, noting that the some farmers have complained about the crackdown as that the Taliban had let them grow and sell poppy.
''How we handle post-Marjah operation will decide a lot,'' she said. ''If we equate good governance with poppy suppression before legal livelihoods are available, we can lose the majority of the population.''
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