Politics of a Bumper Crop

Opium and Afghanistan

By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

March 6, 2002

Though Britain has been blaring its support for America's "War on Terror", there is public disquiet in the UK at one aspect of the new era of freedom now prevailing in Afghanistan: the renewal of opium cultivation, banned with unprecedented and near total success by Mullah Omar in July of 2000.

In order to receive US aid, Hamid Karzai's coalition had to make a pro forma announcement in January that opium cultivation is still forbidden, but the extent of this renewed commitment to abstention from Afghanistan's prime cash crop was almost simultaneously displayed in the unceremonious ejection of Afghanistan's drug control agency from its offices in Kabul, with the drug czar's desk being kicked physically into the street.

A couple of weeks ago the London Guardian reported in a headline that "MI5 [Britain's counter-intelligence agency] fears flood of Afghan heroin". The ensuing story by Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton Taylor led with the news that "Police and intelligence agencies have been warned that Britain is facing a potentially huge increase in heroin trafficking because of massive and unchecked replanting of the opium crop in Afghanistan The expectation is that the 2002 crop will be equivalent to the bumper one of three years ago, which yielded 4,600 tonnes of raw opium."

The Guardian went on to report a new assessment by the UN office for drug control and crime prevention, based in Vienna, that after the war the West stands to lose the "best ever opportunity" to suffocate the illegal trade. Afghanistan is the source of 75% of the world's heroin and 90% of Britain's supply.

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