U.N. sees Afghan drug battle faltering

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's criminal underworld has compromised key government officials who protect drug traffickers, allowing a flourishing opium trade that will not be stamped out for a generation, an ominous U.N. report released Tuesday said.

The fight against opium production has achieved only limited success, mostly because of corruption, the joint report from the World Bank and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said.

The findings show a "probability of high-level (government) involvement" in drugs, said Doris Buddenberg, the UNODC's Afghanistan representative and co-editor of the report.

The report in particular presented a strong indictment of the Interior Ministry, which runs the country's police, and said Afghanistan's criminal underworld could not operate without the support of the political "upperworld."

"The majority of police chiefs are involved," one senior police officer told the report's authors on condition of anonymity. "If you are not, you will be threatened to be killed and replaced."

The spokesman for the counternarcotics ministry said there is no evidence high-ranking officials are involved in Afghanistan's drug trade.

"If there is evidence, we welcome the evidence and the arrest will be on the spot," Zalmai Afzali said.

Poppy cultivation and the heroin it produces has become a major problem in Afghanistan, providing funds for the Taliban insurgency that has caused the deaths of more than 3,700 people this year.

Opium production in Afghanistan rose 49 percent this year to 6,100 metric tons. The harvest provided more than 90 percent of the world's opium supply and was worth more than $3.1 billion.

The 210-page report, titled "Afghanistan's Drug Industry," is the first comprehensive assessment of the country's drug production. Instead of sustained declines in cultivation, successful efforts to reduce poppy growing in one province often lead to increases elsewhere, the report found.

Poppies take up less than 4 percent of the total cultivated area in Afghanistan, and most districts do not grow opium, the report said.

But the $3.1 billion export value of last year's crop accounted for about one-third of total economic activity in the country, and about 13 percent of Afghans are involved in the trade.