THE AFGHAN government is allowing drug traffickers to operate “with impunity” and officials who try to stop the country’s multibillion-dollar narcotics trade face death threats, a United Nations anti-drugs agency said yesterday.
President Hamid Karzai’s beleaguered government was also told to show “strong political will and firm action” in tackling drug-related corruption in a report by the International Narcotics Control Board.
The organisation’s president, Hamid Ghodse, said the problem was “endemic at all levels of the government, from the provincial level to the central level”. The strong tone reflects growing frustration among international counter-narcotics officials that the Afghan government is reluctant to take steps against ever more powerful drug mafias whose money is likely to play a big role in this year’s presidential election campaign.
The INCB’s annual report also urged the Afghan government to take “effective measures” against corrupt officials and make the outcomes public. The country has failed to prosecute a single one of the kingpins western officials say are known to control the drugs trade.
Lack of progress in tackling endemic corruption has led many of Mr Karzai’s western allies, including officials now in the Obama administration, to speculate that Afghanistan might be better off with a new president.
“The Afghan government is plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption,” Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, told confirmation hearings last month.
Recently a senior Nato officer complained that efforts by the ministry of counter-narcotics were going “backwards – there’s too much money to be made in it”. But the government maintains it is committed to fighting drug crime and has set up a “high office of oversight for the implementation of anti-corruption strategy” to weed out corrupt officials.
Mr Karzai’s government has been extremely sensitive to accusations that it is soft on corruption. Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the foreign minister, reacted furiously last month when the Financial Times first reported Mrs Clinton’s description of the country as a “narcostate”.
Mr Karzai has also angrily denied reports that officials in the previous US administration identified his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as being intimately involved in the $3bn (€2.4bn) a year drug trafficking business from his base in the southern province of Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s main poppy-producing areas. Mr Karzai insists there is no evidence to back up the claims, and that the allegations follow his criticism of civilian deaths caused by western military air strikes.
Mr Ghodse, who has had several meetings with Mr Karzai, said he did not think there was any shortage of political will from the president, who “is proud of the work he has done against drugs”. Others who have worked closely with Mr Karzai are not so sure. Abdul Jabar Sabit, a former attorney-general, said last year that although Mr Karzai had in the past been keen to tackle corruption, he lacked the “guts” to confront some of the most egregious offenders.
This view is echoed by members of Force 333, an elite group of Afghan anti-narcotics commandos funded by the UK and mentored by the special air service regiment, which is seen as one of the shining success stories in the struggle against drugs.
One officer said the unit felt “totally unappreciated” by the country’s rulers, some of whom have suffered huge financial loses from its operations. In June last year the unit was partly responsible for the biggest seizure of drugs in history: almost 240 tonnes of hashish near the Pakistani border.
But with an estimated value of $450m, the operation earned Force 333 the opprobrium of some powerful people who had shares in the cache, including a former provincial governor. The officer said some of his fellow members were looking for new jobs, while others were reluctant to leave their families unprotected at home when they went on operations.
The INCB said although Afghanistan’s opium harvest fell in 2008 after international efforts to persuade farmers to switch crops, it was still the second biggest on record. While the area under cultivation was reduced by a fifth, better yields meant production dropped only 6 per cent.