Home > UK under pressure to stem Afghan opium growth
UK under pressure to stem Afghan opium growth
by Open-Publishing - Sunday 18 September 20052 comments
International Europe Health UK
by Mark Oliver
The home secretary, Charles Clarke, and EU interior ministers were today grappling with how to stop the flood of narcotics from Afghanistan, increasingly a responsibility of the UK.
The UK is under pressure from EU countries to take a lead role in the fight against heroin production in Afghanistan, with Britain taking over the Nato mission in the country next May.
As much as 90% of the heroin from Afghanistan ends up in Europe and there is concern about the impotency of current efforts to block the supply.
With the UK currently holding the EU presidency, Afghanistan was a main item on the agenda at today’s EU justice and home affairs council meeting being hosted by Mr Clarke in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The European ministers were talking about the drugs issue with Afghanistan’s interior minister, Habibullah Qaderi, on the final day of the two-day meeting.
A key issue was how to get Afganistan’s impoverished farmers to switch from opium to alternative sources of income.
Mr Clarke said yesterday that fighting the narcotics trade in Afghanistan was "not simply a money issue".
"It’s a very tough problem, there are very powerful and strong interests" behind the trade, which some believe is imperilling Afghanistan’s new democracy.
The UN said recently that while a crackdown had led to some reduction of opium poppy cultivation across Afghanistan, production of the drug was almost unchanged.
The UK currently has around 900 troops in Afghanistan but its presence there is expected to grow to at least 3,000 by next year. There has been speculation that as UK troop numbers are expected to diminish in Iraq, more will be deployed to Afghanistan.
Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and other countries have also sent troops and reconstruction teams as part of the Nato mission.
Luxembourg justice minister, Luc Frieden, who is at the Newcastle meeting, said taking the right approach with the farmers was the key.
"Just asking them, ’please don’t produce drugs anymore’ just does not work. We have to give them the know-how, the equipment, the money and the strategy to stop the drugs production."
EU officials are worried that the reconstruction of Afghanistan will be increasingly threatened if the problem is not tackled, fearing a return of the Taliban to power.
"The money coming from the drugs sector is playing an important role in political parties and movements and that is an important worry," said Mr Frieden.
The EU, the US and other top donors have given hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to fight the world’s biggest drug industry.
Ministers at today’s meeting also discussed counter-terrorism measures and illegal immigration from Africa.
Mr Clarke was continuing his efforts to convince EU ministers to agree to counter-terrorism plans for the compulsory storage of billions of phone and internet records.
Critics say the plan would be too intrusive and expensive. But Mr Clarke has questioned fears from the telecommunications industry about the scale of the cost.
He hopes to win agreement on the issue by the end of the year.
Forum posts
19 September 2005, 12:48
How are you going to stop drug production, when the US army is helping the local warlords protect that production?
20 September 2005, 07:08
The UK and America have been in the opium trade for centuries now, that is a habit that is really hard to break. The Chinese tried to keep the British and Americans from importing opium into China from British trading companies in India which during the late 1800s were the world’s largest producer. The Boxer Rebellion (1900) was fought by the opium merchant’s ships and British and American ships which bombarded China’s ports with their cannons killing many Chinese and terrorising their port cities until the Chinese government agreed to permit them to continue pushing opium in China. As a result many Chinese became addicted and it became the very problem that the Chinese government tried to unsuccessfully prevent and it brought huge fortunes to the merchants dynastys who’s decendents are still wealthy today. U.S. schools gloss over the opium wars because it shows that these governments, in conjunction with the drug pushers and are corrupt and will do anything for money, always did and always will do.
There is also some evidence of the opium trade in the Golden Triangle by the U.S. during the Vietnam war and a possible true reason for the Vietnam war. Many returning G.I.s were addicted to heroin and became regular customers of the heroin trade when they returned to the states. The C.I.A. was also implicated in the cocaine trade during the Reagan years, Bush was then the Vice President having been a former head of the C.I.A. Its a pattern and easily understood when you factor in the money to be made and the laws that are made concerning the competition etc......follow the money on that one as well.