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Struggling for Solutions As Opium Trade Blossoms
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai and officials from many European countries argued vigorously against spraying, saying it would kill other crops and poison the land. The United States recently backed down -- reluctantly -- under increasing pressure from Karzai, who in turn is facing an upcoming election and domestic criticism that he is subservient to Washington.
"We're not going to start spraying," said Tom Schweich, the U.S. State Department's coordinator for counternarcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan. "Karzai said he didn't want to, that it looked heavy-handed."
Schweich said U.S. officials continue to disagree with Karzai and many NATO allies.
"Spray by air, there are fewer people who die, but it appears more heavy-handed," Schweich said. "Go in manually" on the ground "and it appears less heavy-handed, but there are more deaths."
The sporadic attempts at forced eradication across Afghanistan have largely failed because of inadequate law enforcement efforts and the corruption that is rife among police and government agencies.
"Eradication is very costly," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a telephone interview from Vienna. "An enormous amount of money is spent with very little accomplished.
Afghan and NATO officials said that this year they are shifting tactics, focusing on eradicating the poppy fields of large farmers, rather than those of impoverished farmers with small plots who are often indebted to drug traffickers, the Taliban or larger landowners. But attempts to convict and imprison major drug traffickers have also largely failed, officials said.
A year and a half ago, Costa inaugurated a $4.4 million maximum-security wing at the Pul-i-Charki prison outside Kabul. Funded by Britain and other European countries, the wing was designed to hold major drug traffickers.
"I said then the weak link was the front door," Costa said. "No more than two or three months later, four drug traffickers ran away through the main door."
He said now "the vast majority of inmates are individuals who were foot soldiers, not anyone with senior responsibility."
Few provinces have a worse track record on poppies than impoverished Uruzgan in south-central Afghanistan, where the Helmand River valley provides one of the region's key drug-trafficking routes.
As the Uruzgan poppy eradication council met around the wood stove, one official passed around copies of notebooks that are being distributed to schoolchildren. The title read, "If we don't destroy the poppies, the poppies will destroy us." Evil-looking cartoon poppies are shown strangling a child, a young woman and a gaunt drug addict as an armed soldier, a woman wielding a Koran and a farmer with a sickle try to protect them.
