KABUL — In May, trafficking is rising, says the "Opium Calendar 2009."
Trading is rising. The insurgency is high.
It’s harvest time in northern Afghanistan, says the calendar, provided by the Interagency Operations Coordination Centre, Counter Narcotics (IOCC), a joint U.S. and British group headquartered in Kabul.
Itinerant laborers are moving from Afghanistan’s cities and from Pakistan to work the fields and harvest what will become more than 90 percent of the world’s opium.
Ubiquitous and illegal under Afghan law, poppy cultivation for opium production and drug trafficking is an immensely complicating factor for U.S. and NATO interests as the U.S. troop increase gets under way.
"It’s feeding the insurgency," Col. Greg Julian, the top U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said earlier this month, adding that it some $300 million a year. "It’s like tying the military’s hands behind its back."
That’s one reason 20,000 Marines and soldiers will be sent into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul provinces this summer.
"Opium is their financial engine," Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, recently told The New York Times. "That is why we think [they] will fight for these areas."
Yet trying to stamp it out — which the Taliban effectively did when they ruled Afghanistan by declaring it was un-Islamic and beheading offenders — also may complicate the counterinsurgency effort.
"It is likely that counternarcotics operations have in some areas enabled insurgents to make common cause with farmers against the Afghan Government and ISAF," said a Defense Department report to Congress last year. "Insurgents can set up a protection racket, exchanging protection against eradication forces for support, supplies, and equipment from locals."
NATO allies and the U.S. have sought to try to deal with Afghanistan’s opium problem in a variety of ways: eradicating poppy fields, arresting traffickers, providing farmers with other crops to grow. But all are fraught with difficulties.
"It’s part of the culture," said Wing Commander Tom Wood of the British Royal Air Force, who, as IOCC chief of staff, is involved in stemming the problem.
The IOCC tracks down the country’s major narcotics networks and interdicts traffickers.
"We look at the intel, We work out who the key players are," Wood said.
When they’ve got good information, they get arrest warrants, served by the Afghan Special Narcotics Force. So far this year, 51 people had been arrested, Wood said.
It’s an approach increasingly being promoted over eradicating poppy crops and punishing poor poppy farmers.
But, Wood said, "To be honest, there is a difficulty. Even though we do arrest these people, they quite often get out. The judicial system is still being put into place. The problem is the system is so corrupt still."
For now, Wood said, the goal is to deny the Taliban the drug money, if not get rid of the drugs. After that, how it all turns out "... is going to be is anyone’s guess," Wood said.
