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Senators Worried Afghanistan Falling Apart
By Jonathan Wright
Reuters
Wednesday 29 October 2003
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two influential U.S. senators questioned the stability of the Afghan government on Wednesday and warned the U.S. envoy and ambassador-designate to Kabul that the country may fall apart on his watch.
"We are in jeopardy of losing Afghanistan to become a failed state again," Sen. Joseph Biden told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing on the nomination of Zalmay Khalilzad as ambassador to Kabul.
"Are you confident that somehow you are not going to go out for an ambassadorship in which things, I wouldn't say fall apart at the seams, but nevertheless seem to be continually unraveling?" asked Sen. Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the committee.
Khalilzad, an Afghan-born diplomat who has been at the center of U.S. policy in Afghanistan for the past two years, might find that "the engine seems to be falling apart" while he is in Kabul, Lugar added. "That would be a very unfortunate experience for you and tragic for us," he said.
Lugar and Biden, a Delaware Democrat and ranking minority senator on the committee, have long urged a greater U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, which the United States invaded in 2001 to overthrow the ruling Taliban.
The Taliban had sheltered al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the man believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington in which 3,000 Americans died.
The Bush administration has given Afghanistan a lower priority than Iraq, as reflected in its request that the U.S. Congress approve $20 billion for rebuilding Iraq and about $1 billion for Afghanistan.
The United States has also pressed other members of NATO to provide most of the troops for an international peace force in Afghanistan. Until recently, it showed little enthusiasm for the idea of expanding the NATO force to areas outside Kabul.
Biden said that even after NATO approved an expansion, he was not sure that the Bush administration fully backed it.
DRUGS AND MONEY
Biden also quoted a report by the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime as saying that Afghanistan was in danger of falling into the hands of drug cartels.
"Either major surgical drug-control measures are taken now or the drug cancer in Afghanistan will keep spreading and metastasize into corruption, violence and terrorism," the U.N. agency's director, Antonio Maria Costa, said in the report.
"The opium framers and traffickers brought home about $2.3 billion -- or about half the country's legitimate gross domestic product -- in 2003, according to this report," Biden said.
Khalilzad said success for the United States in Afghanistan was likely. "I think we are making progress. There are some trends that are not positive although I think we are heading strategically in the right direction," he added.
"Those leaders who behave as warlords, I think their future is in some serious question. ... An area that I will focus on would be to assist the government ... to extend its authority and get faction leaders to cooperate and, if they don't cooperate, to find another line of work for them," he said.
But U.S. officials said the National Security Council, where Khalilzad worked as special envoy for Afghan policy, was not unduly concerned about the phenomenon of Afghan warlords, who control whole provinces and run private armies.
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Afghanistan 'at the mercy of narco-terrorists'
By Ian Traynor in Zagreb
The Guardian UK
Thursday 30 October 2003
Opium trade threatens to destroy infant democracy, warns UN
Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by "narco-terrorists" and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.
Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world's biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates despite the introduction of western programmes aimed at eliminating the drug .
The UN's annual survey of Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation and production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international community, humanitarian organisations and charities to wean Afghan farmers off the lucrative crop.
The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this year's harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the bumper production of 4,600 tonnes of opium in 1999, a year before Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.
This year's production of 3,600 tonnes represents a 6% year-on-year increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.
"The country is at a crossroads," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UNODC. "There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists."
Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in western Europe, supplying 90% of the market.
The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world's illicit opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan. The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic product.
The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.
The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe via Moscow and St Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.
"Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this, the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to Kabul," Mr Costa said.
"Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country and on its borders."
In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.
To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition of the regime.
The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year's opium production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a "major resurgence" of poppy growing".
Mr Costa called for stiff "interdiction measures", backed by the international community, "to destroy the terrorists' and warlords' stake in the opium economy".
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