US Condones Drug Production Growth in Afghanistan

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released its annual survey on Nov. 12 which reports that in Afghanistan, opium poppy cultivation has risen in 2014, breaking last year’s record. The total cultivation area has reached 224,000 hectares, which is seven percent more than that in 2013.*

U.N. analysts estimated that this amount of poppy cultivation can produce about 6,400 tons of opium. Moreover, the bulk of the product may appear in Russia. And this is all happening under the strict control of American troops based in the country.

“Americans condone the growth of drug production. In the Criminal Code it is called criminal negligence,” said Andrei Klimov, Deputy Council Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Russian Federation Council, in an interview with Izvestia. “As long as Americans have been based in Afghanistan, drug traffic has been growing. Americans actually have chosen not to fight this, arguing they are not in Afghanistan for that reason. According to them, the U.S. does not want to increase the number of American troop casualties. If they start fighting against poppy cultivation, they will be shot by drug dealers. They only want to fight against the Taliban, although everybody understands that drugs and the Taliban are twin brothers.”

In Klimov’s opinion, some Americans have even profited from the growing drug traffic. And, in his opinion, there is truth to the theory that exporting drugs to Russia is in line with American interests.

“It is beneficial to many Americans who believe that Russia has to be vanished from the surface of the earth, and there is nothing better than drug addiction. They strictly fight against people who are trying to bring drugs into the U.S., but they do not do anything to stop drug exports to other countries,” said the legislator. “If we compare the years that Soviet troops were in Afghanistan to the years NATO has been based there, drug production increased approximately 20 times during the time NATO was there. It is part of America’s responsibility; it is obvious now what kind of democracy they promote. But such democracy is not very noticeable over there; instead, there are more drugs now. This is exactly what American society gives to the countries it occupies.”

According to General Makhmut Gareev, who has been to Afghanistan multiple times, the major drug flow goes to Russia, neighboring Central Asian countries, Ukraine, and through the Baltic states to Europe.

“Drug production has increased by 44 times in the 10 years since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan,” said Gareev. “Besides that, U.S. airmen are involved in the drug trafficking. This business makes $50 billion a year.”

The fact that Americans are involved in Afghan drug production seems undeniable to a member of the Russian Geographical Society, Dr. Alexander Knyazev, who has worked in Afghanistan for a very long time.

“For the U.S., drug production in Afghanistan is an easy tool for impacting the countries of the Eurasian continent, one that does not even require its own efforts,” said Knyazev. “As for Americans, Afghan drugs are not a problem — in the Western Hemisphere they appear accidentally, occasionally. As for the Russian Federation, Iran, all of the countries in the region, and recently for China as well, it is a blow to the demography and gene pool. That and corruption. In actual fact, this is the weapon of mass destruction; that is why the U.S. has turned a blind eye to it for 13 years already.”

According to Knyazev’s words, the problem of Afghan drug production is not in Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, the problem is not in the production, but in the distribution. And this is a question for the control, force and special structures of other countries — neighbors of Afghanistan, the transit countries, and the consumer countries.

The experts think that after the withdrawal of U.S. military forces, which is supposed to be at the end of 2016, the situation involving drug production in the country will not change, considering U.S. inactivity during its presence in Afghanistan.

In the opinion of the director of the Center for Contemporary Afghan Studies, Omar Nessar, Russia needs to impose a barricade to Afghan drugs, creating different protecting barriers in the transit countries. However, this way out leads to political and economic risks, and it needs to be intricately analyzed.

According to the U.N.’s data, Afghanistan produces more than 80 percent of all of opiates in the world. Profit on the sale is equal to four percent of the gross domestic product — $850 million. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent $7.6 billion on the fight against drug production in Afghanistan.

According to statistics from the Russian Federal Service for Drug Control, Afghanistan annually produces up to 150 billion doses of heroin.

Editor’s note: A hectare is a unit of surface measurement in the metric system equal to approximately 2.47 acres.