The United States is opening a second front in Afghanistan, moving from a war on terror to a war on drugs that it hopes will lead to indictments of Afghan heroin millionaires in U.S. courts within months, diplomats say. After three years of letting Afghanistan's narco-economy go from strength to strength, Washington has heeded warnings that the Islamic nation's transition to democracy will go badly wrong if drug money is allowed to take over the system. Unlike Colombia, there are no drug cartels, Western drug enforcement agents say, but the United States has identified a handful of potential Afghan suspects for prosecution. "The United States would like to find a way to indict if it can gather intelligence that establishes a nexus between individuals in Afghanistan and drugs trafficked into the United States," according to a Western diplomatic source.
Officials say the speed with which Afghan traffickers have ramped up output is remarkable. There was a 64 percent increase in the area that was harvested this year and opium production is moving back toward the 1999 peak of over 4,500 tonnes. Western governments, led by Britain, and now backed by U.S. muscle and money, have come up with a three-pronged strategy to reverse the trend -- arrests, eradication and alternative livelihoods for poor farmers. The fresh impetus comes as President Hamid Karzai prepares to form a new cabinet after winning a historic election on Oct. 9 that will bring down the curtain on the interim government he has headed since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. The interim government was cobbled together when the priority was the war on terror following the downfall of the Taliban militia. That compulsion forced Karzai, with U.S. backing, to include men known as warlords and drug runners in his cabinet.
Karzai has said the time for coalitions is over, warlords are Afghanistan's number one enemy and the cabinet's new blood will be drug free. But until he is inaugurated and announces his cabinet, police will be careful who they go after. "I'll tell you the names (of the suspects) once we have an elected president," said Major General Sayed Kamal Sadaat, director general of operations at the interior ministry's department for counter-narcotics. Washington has no extradition treaty with Afghanistan, but there are moves afoot to put the legal machinery in place, and diplomats say the first indictment in the United States could happen in months. The U.S. campaign to net one of the big fish must start with arrests in the United States, checks on phone records and so forth until the heroin trail is traced back to the source. Officials have identified at least two individuals with net worth of over $100 million who could be targets. Much of their funds are believed to be invested in construction and real estate in Dubai. While a handful of people have become drug millionaires there are some two million people in rural households who rely on growing poppy for their livelihood. Weaning them onto other crops will be a priority come the new year, when officials expect eradication to begin in a big way. |