With scarves hiding some of their faces and guns at the ready, dozens of members of a new secretive Afghan anti-drug squad zoomed into a desert village to bust the country's biggest narcotics market, authorities said.
They seized 2 tonnes of opium and 250kg of heroin, but hundreds of smugglers had already sneaked out the back and fled to safety across the nearby Pakistani border. No one was arrested.
Under fire for not being tough enough on drugs, the government Tuesday showed a video of the weekend raid and said it proves it is cracking down on an industry that last year produced nearly 90 percent of the world's opium.
The market in Bahram Shah village in southern Helmand province is used by up to a thousand traffickers of opium and heroin every day and is on smuggling routes to Pakistan and Iran. The Ministry of Interior said it had not been targeted before because it was considered too remote and too well protected.
In a statement, the ministry said the raid had "totally disrupted the activities of drug traffickers."
"We are determined to bring to justice the drug smugglers and you will soon witness that all smugglers will be brought to justice," General Mohammed Daoud, deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, said at a news conference in the capital, Kabul.
When asked why the anti-drug forces didn't manage to arrest any of the traffickers, he said that the Pakistani border was just 80m away and that a framework for cooperation between security forces on both sides of the frontier was still being finalized.
The video shows members of the Afghan Special Narcotics Force riding across the desert on the back of pickup trucks toward the drugs market. It then cuts to a shot of a small fire, which the deputy minister said was the seized drugs being destroyed.
Also seized in the raid were 3 1/2 tonnes of chemicals used to process opium into heroin, Daoud said.
He said anti-drug forces have arrested 26 suspected smugglers across the country recently, but he declined to elaborate on the cases.
The government says figures over the past three years -- since US-led forces ousted the Taliban -- show police are now confiscating larger amounts of opium, from 3 tonnes in 2002 to more than 135 tonnes last year, and 50 tonnes so far this year.
Despite the numbers, many fear Afghanistan is fast becoming a "narco-state," less than four years after the US-led invasion ended its role as a haven for al-Qaeda.
A diplomatic cable sent May 13 from the US Embassy in Kabul addressed to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a US-sponsored crackdown on the narcotics industry had not been very effective, partly because President Hamid Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership," according to a New York Times report.
During a visit to Washington last week, Karzai rejected the criticism and said that opium poppy production will be down 20 percent to 30 percent this year and his country would be rid of the drug in five or six years.
The US, Britain and other countries are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the anti-drug campaign. The cash is being used to train police units to destroy laboratories, arrest smugglers and destroy opium crops, as well as to fund projects to help farmers grow legal crops.
However, the drug traffickers have hit back at the threat to their business. Earlier this month in two attacks on subsequent days, gunmen killed 11 people associated with a US-sponsored project encouraging farmers not to grow poppies.
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