Afghan opium cultivation again rose to historic levels this year, UN officials reported on Wednesday. In a sign of how deeply entwined drug trafficking and the Afghan political system have become, the officials said that the protracted elections earlier this year were at least part of the cause.
“With the presidential election ongoing, there was a huge demand for funding,” UN Office on Drugs and Crime senior official Jean-Luc Lemahieu said. “And that funding is not available in the licit economy, and that money has to come from somewhere, so they turned to the illicit economy.”
Still, officials noted at least one encouraging sign, saying that the new government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai had moved to arrest three judges accused of aiding the escape of a drug kingpin wanted by the US.
The three judges accused of corruption are in custody in Kabul, according to Afghan and international officials. The men are accused of engineering the release of Haji Lal Jan Ishaqzai in June, while he was serving a 20-year sentence for drug trafficking.
In 2011, Ishaqzai was designated a drug kingpin by US President Barack Obama, a procedure that imposes financial sanctions on major drug lords. Afghan authorities arrested him in 2012 and convicted him in a special drug court in Kabul last year.
The arrests of the judges were welcomed by UN officials as a signal that Ghani’s government was willing to treat the country’s drug trafficking problem more seriously than past officials have done.
Still, the problem has never been worse.
In their annual opium survey, the UN agency and the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics on Wednesday said that Afghan opium cultivation had increased by 7 percent over the past year, while production had increased as much as 17 percent. The rise came even though worldwide demand for Afghan opium has stagnated and prices have dropped for the country’s opium farmers.
The agencies said the numbers were particularly worrisome because last year, opium cultivation increased 49 percent over the year before, reaching its highest levels since the fall of the Taliban.
The Taliban regime in the late 1990s was the only Afghan government to completely eradicate opium cultivation, but the Taliban now both taxes and actively participates in opium production.
The eight-month presidential and provincial elections, which included two rounds of voting and a protracted dispute over the results, affected opium production not only in the increased demand by politicians for campaign cash, but also in diverting police and military resources to the elections and away from opium eradication.
Opium crop eradication decreased by 63 percent from last year to this year, the report said.
Such changes were seen in nearly all provinces where there were eradication efforts underway. Such programs are led by provincial governors, who are political appointees of the president.
Andrey Avetisyan, a former Russian ambassador to Afghanistan who now heads the UN drug agency in Kabul, said that UN officials had met with Ghani Ahmadzai recently and were encouraged by his concern.
“He understood well that drug trafficking suffocates the normal economic development,” Avetisyan said. “We are quite optimistic.”
“Ashraf Ghani is not a magician, but at least Ashraf Ghani said all the right words, with a lot of passion,” Lemahieu said. “The criminalization of economics and politics threatens everything he wants to achieve.”
Ishaqzai’s arrest and conviction in 2012 was a major victory for the country’s drug enforcement efforts. However, he was then transferred to Kandahar to serve his 20-year sentence.
In the prison there, former warden Mohammed Akbar Zabuli “treated him like a bride and allowed Jan to carry a cellphone and provided him with a separate cell to live in,” said one Kandahar prison official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Zabuli could not be reached for comment.
The prison official said Ishaqzai had sometimes been allowed to spend the nights in his own home and was returned to the Kandahar prison in the daytime.
Ishaqzai had close connections with relatives of former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and was also close to the Taliban, narcotics investigators said.
His arrest became possible only after Karzai’s powerful half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated in 2011 in Kandahar. Karzai ran Kandahar at that time, and many Western officials expressed concern about his close relations with drug traffickers.
International officials said that many efforts were made last year to persuade Karzai to pardon Ishaqzai, but they were thwarted by opposition from international law enforcement officials. His escape in June may have been prompted by concern that his connections would weaken under a new government.
Officials in Kandahar said that after the judges quietly got him released, Ishaqzai was believed to have fled to Helmand Province, to his home district of Sangin, where the insurgents are strong.
Others say he fled to Quetta, Pakistan, where he has close relations with Taliban leaders and other relatives.
Ishaqzai is such a powerful and feared figure that most officials in Kandahar and Kabul were reluctant to comment on Wednesday on the arrests of the judges accused of releasing him.
For example, Shamsul Rahman Raiskhail, head of the appeals court in Kandahar, said that he did not know the names of the judges who had been arrested and referred questions to the Afghan Supreme Court in Kabul.
Five Supreme Court officials were contacted, but all refused to comment on the case, or claimed to have no knowledge of it.
Opium trafficking has been estimated to be worth about one-fifth of Afghanistan’s legitimate GDP, making it an US$8 billion-a-year business, based on last year’s figures. With world demand no longer rising, a growing domestic market for opiates has seen drug addiction in Afghanistan rise greatly, with an estimated 1.5 million drug abusers in a country of 30 million people, UN officials have said.
“What was missing in the last decade was political will,” said Lemahieu — both on the part of world leaders, who could not agree on how to attack the opium problem, and on the part of “national entities who saw this as one big opportunity.”
Additional reporting by Taimoor Shah and Jawad Sukhanyar
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