Karzai Pledges to Target Drug Trade

After being sworn in as Afghanistan’s first elected president, Hamid Karzai vowed Tuesday to confront narcotics terrorists, who have emerged as one of the greatest threats to the nation’s new democracy.

Karzai told well-wishers at his inauguration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, that his new government’s top two priorities would be to expand security and stability in the country and to work for “the destruction of poppy cultivation, its smuggling and trading.”

“We have now left a hard and dark past behind us, and today we are opening a new chapter in our history,” Karzai said.

“The war against terrorism has not finished yet,” he said. “Even though terrorists are not a very big, destructive danger for us, their drug smuggling is what concerns us now in the region and in the world.”

Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, accounting for an estimated three-quarters of the global supply. Afghan farmers have increased their opium production by 64% this year, according to a United Nations report, and much of it is processed into heroin.

The Taliban regime was close to eradicating opium farming before U.S.-led forces overthrew the extremist mullahs in late 2001 for harboring the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Several Afghan warlords who are U.S. allies, as well as the Taliban, are now said to be profiting from the opium trade, which is worth billions of dollars to Afghanistan’s struggling economy.

Karzai was chosen interim president by a conference of Afghan leaders after the Taliban’s fall and sought to consolidate power by negotiating with warlords who lead private militias.

“Various parts of Afghanistan have been captured by regional powerbrokers who oppose reform,” William Byrd, a senior World Bank economic advisor, wrote in a September report. “Their operations are fueled by the opium trade and bolstered by their ability to rule illegitimately by force, relatively unchecked, outside Kabul.”

The British government has led anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan, in part because Europe is the main market for Afghan heroin. But as trafficking, and its links with terrorism, has become a bigger threat to Afghan security, the U.S. has begun to do more to combat it.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced last month that it was expanding its anti-narcotics operations in Afghanistan by permanently stationing special agents and intelligence analysts here.

DEA teams will begin working with U.S. troops early next year to find and disrupt drug networks. The agency said it had already helped seize 32,915 pounds of heroin on the shipment route through Central Asia to Europe in the first nine months of this year.

About 350 political and tribal leaders from across Afghanistan have been invited by Karzai’s government to attend a two-day conference beginning today on counter-narcotics efforts. The most complex, and potentially most dangerous, stage of Afghanistan’s transition lies ahead. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for early April, and U.S. forces plan to step up pressure through the winter on Taliban guerrillas and their allies, who remain a potent force in large parts of eastern and southern Afghanistan.

Karzai’s government has been quietly negotiating for months with people it considers moderate Taliban leaders. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad recently offered an amnesty to Taliban fighters who would agree to lay down their weapons. The offer excluded between 50 and 100 leaders suspected of crimes against humanity. A Taliban spokesman rejected the amnesty.

At a news conference with Cheney, the most senior American official to visit Afghanistan since the Taliban’s fall from power, Karzai said Afghanistan’s achievements had been possible only because of U.S. help.

“Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists, destroyed, poverty-stricken and without its children going to school or getting an education,” Karzai said.