Afghanistan will encourage its powerful drug lords to invest their illegally earned profits back into the war-shattered country, according to the governor of the nation's top opium-growing region.
The offer comes amid warnings of another bumper poppy crop that will fuel a booming narcotics trade that already accounts for 35 percent of the impoverished nation's income.
"We as a government will provide them the opportunity to use their money for the national benefit," said Helmand Governor Mohammed Daud during a two-day trip this week to the region by US Ambassador Ronald Neumann.
"They must invest in industries. They must invest in construction companies," he said.
But he said so far the government has had no success in attracting the drug lords to open new businesses, and that most of the money is being sent overseas.
So profitable is the drug trade that it employs about one in 10 Afghans and brought in US$2.8 billion last year, Afghan and US officials say. The vast majority of that goes to traffickers and only a fraction to farmers.
About 140,000 hectares of poppies are believed to have been planted this year -- an increase of up to 40 percent from last year. The opium is refined into heroin before being smuggled out of the country to meet 90 percent of the world's supply.
A US diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the drug trade was so entrenched that it was difficult to confront the narco bosses head-on.
He said one or two major traffickers have approached the Afghan government for talks on a possible informal amnesty in return for ending their involvement in drugs, swearing allegiance to President Hamid Karzai's government, investing their money at home and paying taxes.
But the diplomat said that no deals had been reached. Most of their money is stashed in banks in the United Arab Emirates, he said.
Asked about the offer in an interview Monday at the main US-led coalition base in Helmand, Neumann compared it to a broad national reconciliation program with Taliban militants and others that aims to bring peace after a quarter century of war.
"It's part of a larger problem, you have militia commanders, you have drug lords, you have all kinds of people that at the end of the day, some of them need to be arrested and put in prison, but basically Afghanistan has to come back together," he said.
But he said he was unaware of a formal program specifically targeting drug lords to get them to invest in Afghanistan.
"There is a lot of effort to get Afghans as a whole to invest ... [but] I don't know of any easy way that we are going to distinguish where the money comes from," he said.
Afghanistan wouldn't be the first nation with a vast drug industry to let barons launder their ill-gotten money.
Washington has accused Myanmar -- once the top world producer of opium -- of allowing drug kingpins and ethnic armies that reached ceasefires with the government to invest in commercial banks and other businesses.
Afghanistan's drug lords have acted with virtual impunity since US-led forces in 2001 ousted the Taliban, which in its last two years in power enforced a virtual ban on opium cultivation.
The new judiciary system is weak and has never prosecuted senior traffickers. The government's approach until now in dealing with drugs has been to forcibly eradicate poppy fields as part of a US and British-backed program, while also providing farmers with the means to grow legal crops.
While last year saw a notable decline in opium cultivation, only a tiny percentage of the opium fields that were planted were destroyed.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion