KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 9 -- Two days after being sworn in as Afghanistan's first popularly elected president, Hamid Karzai called on his countrymen Thursday to wage holy war against the booming Afghan opium trade, which he described as a worse "cancer" than terrorism or the Soviet invasion of 1979.
At the opening of a two-day narcotics conference, a visibly impassioned Karzai warned that the drug trade was imperiling efforts to rebuild the country, restore national honor and establish democracy three years after the fall of the Taliban.
President Hamid Karzai at a two-day conference in Kabul on drug trade.
(Ahmad Masood -- Reuters)
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"Opium cultivation [and] heroin production [are] more dangerous than the invasion and the attack of the Soviets on our country," Karzai told an audience of bearded tribal elders, provincial governors and foreign diplomats. They are "more dangerous than the factional fighting in Afghanistan. . . . more dangerous than terrorism."
Karzai vowed that "just as our people fought a holy war against the Soviets, so we will wage jihad against poppies." Afghan guerrillas battled Soviet troops for a decade before Moscow withdrew its forces.
Last month, the United Nations reported that the cultivation of poppies, from which opium is extracted, had risen 64 percent in the country since 2003 and had spread to all 32 provinces. Valued at nearly $3 billion, the opium trade accounted for more than 60 percent of gross domestic product last year, according to the U.N.'s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004. Afghanistan supplies an estimated 87 percent of the world's opium.
The country's opium production all but disappeared in 2001 because of a severe crackdown by the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic group that ruled most of Afghanistan for five years. The skyrocketing resurgence of cultivation and trafficking has alarmed the Bush administration, which has asked Congress for $780 million to combat the trade.
But the effort faces strong resistance from those profiting from the industry, including police and government officials, some of whom are said to occupy senior positions in Karzai's administration, according to news reports. Opium is also said to provide a major source of income for some of the same militia leaders who helped U.S.-led forces drive the Taliban from power in late 2001.
Some U.S. officials have argued that the most effective way to combat the problem is by spraying chemical defoliants from aircraft. The tactic has been used on a large-scale basis in Colombia to destroy coca plants, which produce cocaine.
But Western officials acknowledge that a similar spraying program could backfire in Afghanistan, given the importance of opium to the struggling rural economy, and Karzai's government has rejected the idea as too politically sensitive.
In a speech to the same conference Wednesday, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, mentioned eradication as just one of a number of anti-drug tactics that would be employed in Afghanistan, including public education, judicial reform, interdiction and the development of alternative sources of income.
Khalilzad said the United States was planning to provide "cash for work" for 125,000 people in three poppy-growing provinces and would also underwrite programs to provide fertilizer and seeds in some areas.
"Illegal drugs pose a mortal threat to Afghanistan's future," said Khalilzad, who called the opium trade "a dark specter that has the potential to undermine all that has been achieved thus far."
