Drug trade 'reaches to Afghan cabinet'

Some cabinet ministers in Afghanistan are deeply implicated in the drug trade and could be diverting foreign aid into trafficking, the country's anti-narcotics minister said on Feb. 4. The admission will dismay Western governments, which last week pledged $10.5 billion in aid to help to fight poverty, improve security and crack down on the drug trade. "I don't deny that," said Habibullah Qaderi in an interview, when asked whether corruption linked to the $4.7 billion-a-year drug trade went right up to the cabinet. Such high-level criminality, he said, would help account for why "a lot of trafficking through different parts of the country" was being conducted with apparent impunity. But he declined to name names and said Afghanistan's weak justice system, itself bedeviled by corruption, meant that it was difficult to convert allegations and rumors into fact. "The question is how to find evidence against these [politicians]." In Kabul, the houses of several senior politicians resemble small palaces with marble corridors, painstakingly manicured lawns and dozens of armed guards. Even in provincial town such as Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, ostentatious homes stand in stark contrast to the poverty around them and are known locally as the houses of "smugglers"–a euphemism for drug traffickers. Western aid officials and several European diplomats named the same high-ranking politicians and officials, including one with close links to Pres. Hamid Karzai, as drug lords. "The Afghans complain that 75 percent of aid is spent directly rather than being filtered through their government, but the reason for that is because otherwise a significant proportion is skimmed off into the pockets of drug lords," said one US aid worker. "Post-Taliban Afghanistan is going to emerge as a low-level narco-state at best." But a veteran European diplomat in Kabul said: "The problem, as ever, is the smoking gun. We all know it is happening. We all know the names. But I have never seen any direct evidence and I don't know anyone who has." Ali Ahmad Jalali, who resigned as Afghanistan's interior minister last year, said: "Sometimes government officials allow their own cars to be used for a fee. Sometimes they give protection to traffickers. "In Afghanistan, corruption is a low-risk enterprise in a high-risk environment. Because of the lack of investigative capacity, it is very difficult to get evidence. You always end up arresting foot soldiers." But he accused Western governments of exaggerating the problem to justify limiting their long-term commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan. The "drug problem in Afghanistan is demand-driven" from the West, he said, with 90 percent of profits being made outside the country. NATO policies, moreover, had helped to consolidate the drug lords because they had focused solely on fighting Taliban and insurgent forces rather than attacking the trade. Jalali urged British troops in Helmand not to ignore narcotics, 90 percent of which end up in Europe. "I understand NATO's argument that if they eradicate poppy fields then that antagonizes the population. But there are legitimate targets–mobile labs and stockpiles–which only drugs lords, rather than ordinary poppy growers, are involved with." A British official said that a number of Afghan members of parliament were linked to the drug trade and that some officials had to be circumvented because they were corrupted by drugs. "There are plenty of people in the national assembly who are very dodgy. Corruption is endemic so I have to be careful with some figures in the Afghan set-up who might not be 100 percent committed to eradicating drugs."