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FLASH 22 (2/19/02): Europe Upset by US Inaction Over Resumed Afghan Opium Production

According to the 2/18/02 Financial Times (London),

"The US and United Nations have ignored repeated calls by the international anti-drugs community to address the increasing menace of Afghanistan's opium cultivation, threatening a rift between Europe and the US as they begin to reconstruct the country....

"European governments believe one of the reasons the US is "out to lunch on the issue", as one diplomat put it, is that Afghan heroin is not a significant player in the US drugs market, accounting for less than 5 per cent of consumption. Colombia, he said, was the focus of the US anti-drugs campaign. This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where Afghan heroin is viewed as a main source of the region's trade in hard drugs."

This article returns to a split referred to in my earlier postings of late last year ( FLASH 5 and FLASH 7) : the US (in contrast to Europe) has no apparent strategy to counteract the huge increase in opium production that has resulted from the defeat of the Taliban, which had banned opium production. (The Afghan opium crop this year is now estimated by the Financial Times to reach 4,500 tons.)

This American acceptance of a restored Afghan drug traffic, a traffic restored in fact by its intervention, calls for an explanation, which I offer elsewhere.

(For my earlier stories see below at FLASH 5 (A): Pre-1990 Drug Networks Being Restored Under New Coalition? and
FLASH 7: Official UN Report about Northern Alliance Drug-Trafficking)