Southwest
Asia:
Afghanistan
to
Encourage
Opium
Lords
to
Invest
at
Home,
Official
Says
3/17/06
The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai will attempt to integrate profits from the opium trade into the legitimate national economy, the governor of the country's leading opium growing province told the Associated Press Tuesday. Drug lords would be encouraged to invest their ill-gotten gains in-country as part of an effort to rebuild a poverty-stricken nation shattered by decades of invasions and internecine conflict.
"We as a government will provide them the opportunity to use their money for the national benefit," Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daud told the AP in front of visiting US Ambassador Ronald Neumann. "They must invest in industries. They must invest in construction companies," he said. The traffickers have the capital to invest. According to the United Nations, Afghan traffickers banked about $2 billion last year. Another $600 million went to the hundreds of thousands of poppy farmers and their families. This year, the UN and Afghan officials predict an even larger crop, with plans to eradicate only a fraction of it. It is difficult to confront the traffickers head on, an unnamed US diplomat told the AP. The Karzai government could grant them an "informal amnesty" if they agreed to get out of the business, pay taxes, and invest their fortunes in rebuilding the country. The diplomat added that one or two traffickers had talked to the government about coming in from the cold. On the record in an AP interview
Monday afternoon, Ambassador Neumann did not reject the idea outright.
Neumann said he was not aware of a formal program encouraging traffickers
to invest. "There is a lot of effort to get Afghans as a whole to
invest... but I don'
He compared bringing in the drug traffickers to the broader project of reconciliation with Taliban militants and war lords. "It's part of a larger problem, you have militia commanders, you have drug lords, you have all kinds of people that at the end of the day, some of them need to be arrested and put in prison, but basically Afghanistan has to come back together," he said. The reason for such apparent complacency toward drug traffickers from US government officials may well lie in the recognition that the Afghan state is so weak and so implicated in the trade already -- it has never prosecuted a major drug trafficker -- that the trade cannot be defeated by traditional means. Still, the effort continues. The Afghan government, with NATO troops hovering in the background, has already begun this year's eradication efforts in southern Helmand and Kandar provinces. So far, violence has been minimal, but in a part of the country where the Taliban roam and have vowed to protect the poppy crop, it's likely to be a long, hot growing season.
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