|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Stemming the Contagion: Regional Efforts to Curb Afghan Heroin's Impact
by Svante E. Cornell
Afghanistan’s heroin industry is one of the most intractable and far-reaching consequences of the violence that has racked that country since 1980. Producing on average three-quarters of the global supply of heroin since the mid-1990s, Afghanistan supplies the majority of heroin consumed in Europe and nearly all the heroin for Russia’s booming market. Even in the United States, a minor portion of the heroin con sumed is of Afghan origin. The human and material costs of heroin addiction have been significant worldwide. In addi tion, money earned from the heroin industry has been a pow erful part of financing rebellions. The Kosovo Liberation Army and the Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey are the best-known rebel groups to have financed their activities through the heroin trade.
The consequences of the Afghan heroin industry have been even worse for Afghanistan’s neighbors. Iran, Pakistan, and the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have become major transit routes for Afghanistan’s opiates. Although many of these countries initially dismissed the transit of drugs through their territory as Afghanistan’s problem alone, they came to perceive this trade as a major and multi- Crime Goes Global faceted threat to their own social, economic, and national security.1
The heroin industry brings crime and addiction that threaten the very fabric of society in states poorly equipped to handle such challenges. The drug trade has exacerbated corruption in the weak states bordering Afghanistan, impairing their economic and political functioning and infiltrating their governments to an unknown extent. With links to insurgency and terrorism, the drug trade threatens national and regional security. Militant organizations such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) have financed their operations through drugs.2 Although systematic research into the phenomenon has been relatively scant, it is clear that the region’s security has become inseparable from Afghanistan’s illicit crops.
With limited international resources and attention, the region has been left alone to deal with the fallout of the drug trade. The total budget of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is roughly $100 million per year globally. This figure is miniscule compared to the estimated $1 billion generated annually by the cultivation of opium in Afghanistan, in addition to the proceeds of heroin processing and smuggling. This disparity has impaired efforts to establish meaningful inter national cooperation—a prerequisite for containing a problem that is transnational by nature. The often tense relations between the states of the region have not helped either. Given the importance of the region to U.S. national security interests, the adverse effect of the drug trade on the region’s stability is bound to harm U.S. interests in Central Asia.
Svante E. Cornell is Deputy Director of the Central Asia-Caucaus Institute, Johns Hopkins University - SAIS and Associate Professor at the Silk Road Studies Program of Uppsala University in Sweden.