Thriving Taliban Drugs Show Afghan Woes

[March 01, 2008]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Taliban have built a huge and profitable drug operation in Afghanistan while provincial governors look the other way, the latest grim sign of backsliding in a country the U.S. has spent six years and billions of dollars trying to salvage.

A report Friday on drugs - it said Afghanistan now produces 93 percent of the world's opium poppy - comes hand in hand with the resurgence of Taliban militants despite U.S. anti-insurgent efforts. Also on the rise: terrorist violence such as roadside bombs, suicide bombings, and attacks on police.

The problems have worsened rather than diminished under the watch of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and the relatively small number of American forces stationed in the nation while larger numbers are deployed to Iraq.

More than 6,500 people - mostly insurgents - died in violence in 2007, according to an Associated Press count of figures provided by local and international officials. It was the bloodiest year since the U.S.-led toppling of the Taliban in 2001.

Afghanistan risks becoming a failed state because of deteriorating international support and the growing insurgency, warned a recent independent study co-chaired by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones and former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering.

Just this week, the top U.S. intelligence official told Congress that President Hamid Karzai's government controls only 30 percent of the country.

The resurgent Taliban control some 10 or 11 percent, while local tribes control the rest, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell said.

That's despite the $140 billion Congress has appropriated for Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 attacks that were the original reason given for U.S. involvement. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is still at large, thought to have fled through Afghanistan's tribal lands to a hideout across the Pakistan border. The U.S. money has gone for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veterans' health care.

Afghanistan's Defense Ministry has rejected McConnell's discouraging assessment, insisting the government controls the vast majority of the country.

However, the State Department's account of the drug problem on Friday was in line with McConnell's view.

Afghan farmers grew more poppies for opium in 2007 than ever before, the report said, the second straight year of record production in the nation the United States invaded.

Afghanistan is by far the world's largest heroin producing and trafficking country.

The drug trade deters progress toward a stable, economically independent democracy, concluded the annual survey of global drug production and trafficking.

The report describes an Afghan twist on the old organized crime protection racket: Drug barons supply the Taliban with money and weapons, and the hardline militants protect the growing regions and help get the drugs to market.

The drug problem is worst in the parts of the country where the Taliban have made their strongest comeback since being chased into the mountains by U.S. forces. The drugs are grown with near impunity in the same stripe of rugged tribal land along the Pakistan border where the U.S.-backed Afghan president has almost no authority and where American and NATO troops are battling the Taliban in the fiercest sustained fighting the Cold War alliance has ever seen.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Friday the alliance is committed to Afghanistan "for the long haul."

"We are there to support President Karzai and the Afghan people," de Hoop Scheffer said during an Oval Office visit with President Bush. "But we're also there because we're fighting terrorism, and we cannot afford to lose. We will not lose. We are not losing; we are prevailing."

The United States, which has some 28,000 forces in the country - both in the NATO-led mission and as part of a separate U.S.-led counterterrorism coalition - is sending an additional 3,200 Marines in April. Most of them are expected to be stationed in Kandahar during their seven-month tour. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says NATO countries will have to come up with the troops to replace the Marines in the fall.

NATO claims that more than six years since the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan, the militant movement is being "contained," with some 70 percent of violence last year occurring in just 10 percent of the country.

All 26 NATO nations have troops in Afghanistan. They have expanded the force from 5,000 to 43,000 since 2003, but many allies - including Germany, France, Spain, Turkey and Italy - have refused to send significant numbers of combat troops to the violent southern part of the country.

That refusal has opened a rift with the United States, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Romania whose troops in the southern provinces have borne the brunt of Taliban violence over the past year. Canada has threatened to pull its 1,700 troops out of Kandahar next year unless allies provide 1,000 reinforcements.

Bush did not mention the strain Friday.

"The United States is committed to the NATO mission in Afghanistan," Bush said. "We're committed to a comprehensive strategy that helps folks in Afghanistan realize security, at the same time, economic prosperity and political progress."

A senior administration official said Friday that while there should be no expectation of a surge in NATO troops after Bush and other NATO leaders meet this spring, there are likely to be "announcements that will be helpful." The official spoke on condition of anonymity to more candidly describe White House thinking. There are increasing signs that France, under the new leadership of President Nicolas Sarkozy, is ready to answer the repeated calls from the U.S. and other allies to step up in Afghanistan.

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On the Net:

A congressional report on cost: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

[Associated Press; By ANNE GEARAN]

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