Voice of Russia
March 31, 2014
Fighting drugs trade – most urgent issue new Afghan president will face
Anna Mikhailova
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The April 5 presidential vote will be held in a climate of uncertainty as NATO combat forces ready their withdrawal at the end of 2014. If successful, the election will usher in the first handover from one elected president to another in Afghan history.
With 11 candidates vying to succeed Hamid Karzai, the country’s permanent leader for the last decade, whoever wins will have a load of vital issues to deal with. The most urgent and obvious one seems to be the economy and in the case of Afghanistan that means fighting the drugs trade.
Afghanistan supplies over 90% of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. In 2007, 92% of the non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This amounts to an export value of about $4 billion. International bodies and governments say the drugs trade is helping to fuel the hard-line Islamic movement Taliban insurgency, which is estimated to receive up to $100m a year from the trade. In addition to opiates, Afghanistan is also the largest producer of cannabis in the world.
In the fourteen years since the launch of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, over one million people in Eurasia have died of Afghan heroin. Intensive transit of drugs from Afghanistan, estimated at $80 billion a year, has contributed to a growth of paramilitary drug trafficking groups, a surge of violence and involvement of several millions of residents of the region in this process. The only unarguable accomplishment of NATO’s military assault in Afghanistan is the fact that opium production has increased by a factor of 40, says Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list.
“This means – and we have to look at this in human terms – this means hundreds of thousands if not millions of Afghans themselves have become addicted to heroin. This means that millions in Russia, in Iran, in Central Asia and elsewhere in the general region have become dependent on heroine. This means tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths through overdose, through HIV, through criminal activity, as a result of this epidemic of heroin,” Rick Rozoff said.
Given the fact that a third of the combined legal and illegal Afghan economy is based on the illegal opium industry, counter-narcotics policy is currently one of the most important elements of domestic politics. So whoever the country chooses as its next President, he has to find the remedy for this disease, and better he does it fast.
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