Narco trafficking

Published August 25, 2016

AS expected, UNODC’s recently released World Drug Report 2016 shows that Afghanistan continues to play a prominent role in the narcotics trade. Although the yield was down by 48pc in 2015 from the year before, at 183,000 hectares (over 452,000 acres) Afghanistan still accounted for almost two-thirds of the global area under illegal poppy cultivation. The decrease, meanwhile, was not on account of any strategies to reduce cultivation but because of poor yields in the country’s southern provinces. According to the report, the number of opiate users around the world is holding steady at 17 million people, a number unlikely to be affected by the fall in production because of surpluses from previous years. As a neighbouring country, Pakistan is a vital cog in the global opiate trade. For while the ‘Balkan route’ which goes through Iran and Turkey to supply Western and Central Europe is the principal conduit, the report describes the ‘southern route’, which traverses Pakistan or Iran by sea to the Gulf region, East Africa, etc as having “grown in importance”. As per UNODC estimates, 43pc of Afghan opiates are trafficked through Pakistan.

The history of this region shows that poppy, whose cultivation began in war-torn Afghanistan in the 1990s in the absence of a stable government, is far more than just a cash crop. Both the Afghan Taliban and the Nato leadership have used this low-maintenance, high-return crop as a political tool for various ends. The Taliban banned it in 2000, despite three years of bumper crops, in the hope of winning some international goodwill. While the ban angered the locals, the West chose to look the other way, a short-sighted decision that only worked to strengthen the hand of the hardliners among the Taliban. Poppy cultivation resumed with gusto after the Taliban’s fall, but the US opted to turn a blind eye again, this time to the huge profits the warlords and officials in the Karzai government were raking in through opium trafficking because their cooperation was vital to hunting down Osama bin Laden. As the Taliban resurgence — now fuelled by its own proceeds from poppy cultivation — gathers strength across Afghanistan, the warlords are needed more than ever, which means opiate trafficking continues as before. Pakistan has stepped up its efforts to control this trade, making seizures worth $2.5bn in 2015, but the only way to close the spigot is to use creative methods to bring down cultivation.

Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2016

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