NATO, US and drugs in Afghanistan

McClatchy has another good article on the problem of drugs in Afghanistan. This one show that NATO and the US have not made much effort to fight the drug problem in Afghanistan.

It is reported that Afghan and Western officials say that U.S. and NATO-led forces failed to take the drug problem seriously for more than six years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 ousted the Taliban regime."They (the Western military) didn't want anything to do with either interdiction or eradication," said Thomas Schweich, a former Bush administration ambassador for counter-narcotics and justice reform for Afghanistan. Schweich said that for example, U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai was seen in 2007 as "trying to prevent serious law-enforcement efforts in Helmand and Kandahar to ensure that he did not lose the support of drug lords in the area whose support he wanted in the upcoming election."

So this is the story in Afghanistan: drugs benefit so many officials in government (just like it benefits the Taliban) that the Afghan government and the US are not interested in seriously eradicating the drugs, since this would weaken their allies.

Since the 2001 US invasion, opium production has jumped in Afghanistan: "After the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, Afghanistan produced some 185 tons of opium in 2001. The next year, production was 3,400 tons, according to U.N. statistics, and by 2007 it was about 8,200 tons, making Afghanistan the source of roughly 93 percent of the world's opium and heroin."