BERLIN, 2 April 2004 — Afghanistan and its six neighbors inked a regional cooperation accord to step up the fight against narcotics, but critics charged that it was insufficient without proper security and could compromise aid efforts. With the drugs trade crippling reconstruction efforts, the deal is aimed at tightening border controls, tackling traffickers — including the possibility of joint cross-border operations — and exchanging information.
President Hamid Karzai, who has persuasively used the drugs issue as a way of drawing aid money from the international community, said it was intricately linked to the country’s other problems.
“Drugs and warlordism and terrorism reinforce each other,” he said at the close of a two-day conference on reconstructing Afghanistan. “For Afghanistan to have peace, you have to address all three at the same time.”
The accord was signed by ministers from Afghanistan, China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Britain, which helped draft it, said Afghanistan could return to peace only if the “cancer” of drugs was eliminated.
“It will not be quick and it will not be easy but it must be done,” British Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien said. Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of poppy-derived opium used to make heroin, part of a narcotics industry that accounts for about half of the country’s gross domestic product.
According to UN officials, it is in danger of turning Afghanistan into a failed narco-state. In the declaration, the ministers “expressed their support for the concept of creating a security belt around Afghanistan with the purpose of organizing an effective system to interdict trafficking of opium products.”
The accord has eight points. They include commitments to boost border security; examine the possibility of coordinated operations; improve judicial and law enforcement measures; swap intelligence and information; destroy crops and disrupt supply chains; promote alternative trades and livelihoods; and seek to reduce local demand. Ministers will meet within a year to assess progress. Britain has been especially keen to tackle the issue as 95 percent of all the heroin that ends up on British streets comes from Afghanistan.
Separately, US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a donation of $123 million this year against drugs. “If we do not take aggressive action today to end the scourge of drugs in Afghanistan, tomorrow may be too late,” he told delegates here.
But a senior aid official warned that poppy eradication could compromise reconstruction efforts. “The eradication policy for poppies is going to destabilize the situation,” said Barbara Stapleton, of the umbrella Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief.
“People in the NGO (non-governmental organization) community are very, very concerned it’s going to interrupt the development programs in these areas.” She said destroying poppy fields “would target the people at the bottom of the social ladder” who had no other livelihood.
Farouk Azam, a former minister in Afghan governments in the early 1990s who now runs a London-based studies group, said fighting drugs would be impossible without extending security across the country. “I think it’s a step, although not a very big one, that sends a message that the international community is out there,” he told AFP.
“The main question is that the crops must be substituted, and that can only be done when there is security. If there’s no security, there will be no functional government machinery and no proper prevention.”
