Peter Oborne

A victory for drug-pushers

Opium production in Afghanistan is booming: Peter Oborne and Lucy Morgan Edwards on how the government has failed to wipe out the trade

This week Tony Blair was warned to brace himself for another huge increase in opium production in Afghanistan. Analysis of a harrowing United Nations report showed that the situation was catastrophically out of control. Inspectors surveyed 134 districts. They learnt that some 23 were planning to plant poppies for the first time in 2003, while another 50 were expecting to increase production. There were some successes for Afghan government-led attempts at elimination. In 28 districts, poppy eradication schemes had worked and production was falling. But these falls were minor compared with rises elsewhere.

The report simply confirmed what UN officials have been saying privately for months. The Afghanistan poppy is on course for a massive harvest, bigger even than last year’s bumper crop and perhaps set for an all-time record. This year’s rise in production will have horrifying consequences. It means that the British street will be flooded with fresh supplies of cheap heroin manufactured from Afghan poppies. It means huge profits for the criminal mafia which runs this sordid trade, and has – as Tony Blair has repeatedly insisted – provable links with al-Qa’eda and other terrorist groups. And it means huge embarrassment for the British government which, back in October 2001, cited Taleban poppy-growing as the major reason, alongside the threat of terrorism, for the invasion of Afghanistan.

Whether the war has done anything to keep terrorism in check remains an open question. But there is no doubt about the prodigious rise of poppy production in Afghanistan since 2001. The government’s predicament is strikingly similar to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in the sense that it undermines the case for war in the first place.

Page 77 of this year’s departmental report from the Foreign Office, published only last week, contains the following remarkable passage: ‘The fall of the Taleban provided a unique opportunity to cut off one of the main sources of supply of heroin to the UK.

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