Special to WorldTribune.com

By John J. Metzler

UNITED NATIONS — The clock is ticking as American and NATO forces begin the countdown to military withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

But as Taliban militants watch the clock and the calendar, eagerly awaiting the foreign troop pullouts, thus hoping to topple the country’s still teetering government, still another threat as dangerous as the Islamic militants lurks in the shadows.

Over the past year, opium production surged 17 percent to hit a record high according to the United Nations. Despite concerted international efforts to stop illicit narcotics production, the opium production in 2013 reached 6,400 tons compared with the previous year’s total of 5,500 tons. And the scourge is getting worse.

Despite serious American anti-narco efforts of $7.5 billion since 2001 to stop Afghanistan’s endemic drug trade, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) reports near futile progress.

UNODC’s Director Yury Fedotov warned that Afghanistan’s narcotics problem remains a major global challenge; “The illicit opium economy and related criminality and corruption continue to undermine security, the rule of law, health and development in the region and beyond.”

Besides local warlords involved in narcotics, there’s a direct link to the Taliban Islamic militants opposing the fragile central government in Kabul.

According to the UN, “Afghanistan produces some 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opiates. Hilmand province, in the south, remains the country’s major opium cultivating area, followed by Kandahar. ” Helmand province was the site of some of the bloodiest encounters between largely British forces and Taliban fighters.

UNDOC’s Fedotov stressed that illicit narcotics had a “disastrous” impact on the already-embattled country. The UN agency adds that “Afghanistan suffers one of the world’s highest prevalence rates for opiate use and HIV hepatitis are widespread among injecting drug users. ”

More than a million Afghans are drug dependent.

Tragically in Afghanistan, drug trafficking is part of a larger web of government corruption, money laundering, and terrorism.

Both the Taliban terrorists and sectors of the central government are mired in the narcotics trade. Thus the drug scourge has serious implications far beyond this South Asian country

UNODC concedes that the Afghanistan is plagued by “fragmentation, conflict, patronage, corruption and impunity.” Sadly that’s probably an understatement.

Washington’s special inspector for Afghan reconstruction candidly admits that the “narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and undermines the Afghan state’s legitimacy by stoking corruption.”

UNDOC official Jean-Luc Lemahieu is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that the drug trade is roughly equivalent to 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product! The narcotics industry indirectly employs over 400,000 people, larger than Afghanistan’s armed forces!

Newly elected Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has stressed the importance of anti-drug efforts but as part of expanding alternative agricultural opportunities. In Hilmand where the “food zone” alternative livelihood program ended in 2012, opium cultivation rose again by 13 per cent. Even with an expansion of legal farming, opium provides six times the income as compared with growing wheat.

Despite the considerable American and NATO troop presence, opium poppy production has blossomed in this huge and rugged country. So what after the Obama Administration’s politically mandated military pullout by the end of 2014?

Ironically Afghanistan’s traditional tribal quilt of warlords may become yet more dependent on narcotics revenues for funding as other foreign assistance support lessens or ends. We must change this metric.

Here’s the short-term scenario. For 2015 there’s a bilateral agreement for keeping a strategic residual force of at least 10,000 American troops to help avoid the predictable debacle the Obama Administration drifted into in Iraq earlier this year. Psychologically a U.S. military presence stiffens Afghan military spirits and bolsters Afghan government resolve.

But just as vital to prevent the rise of a Taliban terrorist takeover in the next few years, both the U.S. and the Kabul government must equally focus on sustained opium eradication programs as to lessen Afghanistan’s global threat as a drug haven and narcotics exporter.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com. He is the author of “Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany; Korea, China”, 2014

  Opium: Tragic tie that binds Afghanistan’s government, Taliban, warlords and people, WorldTribune.com