© Reuters
Pino Arlacchi, the leader of the United Nations Drug Control Program, said in an interview that initial surveys of Afghanistan in the midst of the annual opium-planting season show that a July edict against its cultivation seems to be taking effect across the country, the world's largest producer of opium.
At the same time, Mr. Arlacchi said, his agency has now amassed strong evidence that local drug lords along the northern border with Tajikistan have stockpiled a supply of opium -- and its derivatives, morphine and heroin -- adequate to supply Europe and the United States for up to three years.
Those dealers, he said, know no factional allegiance. They may be merchants, local officials, even mullahs. They operate in territories controlled by the Taliban or their enemies, the remnants of the former government now known as the Northern Alliance -- or by nobody.
''We have detailed evidence of the existence of a huge system of stockpiles and deposits and laboratories in Afghanistan, particularly in the northern part along the border,'' said Mr. Arlacchi, an Italian narcotics expert who helped bring down the Sicilian Mafia a decade ago.
''We know of 40 deposits, whose turnover reaches around 100 tons of heroin every year,'' he said, speaking from Rome, where he is preparing to open an international conference on transnational crime on Tuesday in Palermo. ''Just to give you an idea what this means, 100 tons is the annual demand of all European addicts, plus addicts in the U.S. And we believe there are other stockpiles in other parts of the country.''
Mr. Arlacchi, who is still under a Mafia death threat -- in the Afghan context he calls it a ''Sicilian fatwa'' -- said that using information from the ground and aerial surveillance ''we are able to locate stockpiles within two meters of the location.''
''We also know the criminals who control them,'' he said. ''Each of these deposits is protected by a group of heavily armed people -- it could be 20 people but it could also be 100 or 150 people -- under the control of these criminal leaders, who sometimes are traders, sometimes local fighters, sometimes local authorities; for instance, the chief of the customs office in the area, the mayor of the village. We have satellite evidence of this.''
''No credible policy to eliminate or reduce cultivation can work in Afghanistan if there is not parallel destruction of these stockpiles,'' he added.
In the next month, Mr. Arlacchi hopes to send about 70 drug control agents, many of them Afghan-born agronomists, into the countryside to survey crops. By the end of January or early February, opium poppies will be in bloom and easy to detect.
''But even if we have a sharp reduction in production in Afghanistan, this will not have any significant immediate consequence for the supply of heroin to Western markets,'' he said. ''Reduction of cultivation is not enough.''
Mr. Arlacchi said the July decision of the Taliban's supreme religious leader, Mullah Omar, to ban all opium cultivation risked sending countless Afghan farmers into destitution and perhaps creating political problems. But a better military position and popular support has helped strengthen the hand of the Taliban leadership, he said.
The Taliban appear to be creating a grassroots system to back the edict, he said, sometimes involving local religious leaders, authorities and elders. ''In a couple of cases we have heard also of groups of farmers put in jail for two or three weeks for having not complied with the ban,'' he said.
Mr. Arlacchi added that it would take time to convince Western nations to help the drug-control program in Afghanistan, as long as the country is under Taliban control.
In the short term, he said, he is confident that emergency relief through the United Nations will be available to help farmers who give up poppy cultivation. But in the long run, the Taliban will have to build international credibility, he said.
They have already learned that in narcotics control, they cannot win outside assistance simply by using promises or threats. ''The Taliban realized that this strategy does not work,'' he said.
Comment: It's seven years later and the Taliban are no longer in control. Guess who is providing fertilizer, other wise know as money, to the poppy growers?