Anti-drug efforts yield success in Afghanistan

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By Celestine Bohlen, BLOOMBERG NEWS

The international community is scoring some rare victories in its war against the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and they aren't on the battlefield.

A campaign led by the United Nations has intercepted several hundred tons of a chemical that helps turn poppy-based opium into heroin since the effort began about a year ago, according to the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The Taliban gets as much as 60 percent of its income from the drug trade, NATO estimates.

U.N. and national police are stopping more shipments of the chemical - acetic anhydride - as the Afghan war turns deadlier, with a record 236 U.S. and allied troops killed so far this year, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks coalition fatalities. U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock, supreme allied commander for Europe, is pushing to increase military involvement in countering a narcotics trade that has funded the Taliban's weapons over the seven-year conflict.

"The soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines of NATO are being killed because of the money being generated from this industry," Gen. Craddock said. Squeezing this trade would "cut the legs out from under" the Taliban "because they won't have the money to pay the bomb makers and buy materials to attack us," he said.

The U.N. campaign includes countries from Slovenia and Turkey to Russia and South Korea and has created an unusual level of cooperation among nations otherwise at odds, including the United States and Iran. In 2006, just 24.5 tons were blocked, according to UNODC.

Afghanistan accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's heroin supply, UNODC said. Almost all of its opium comes from seven southern provinces controlled by the Taliban and local drug lords in the epicenter of the war, which has caused the deaths of more than 980 U.S. and allied troops since it began in 2001.

"The geographical and logistical overlap of opium and the insurgency is well-established," said Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC's executive director. "Since drugs are funding insurgency, and insurgency enables drug cultivation, insurgency and narcotics must be fought together."

Acetic anhydride is used in dyes and perfumes, for metal buffing and by the pharmaceutical industry for such products as aspirin and the pain reliever paracetamol. It is produced in 21 nations and has long been under international controls.

The United Nations' goal is to stop shipments from being diverted illegally from distribution routes in importing countries. Because there aren't any authorized uses for acetic anhydride in Afghanistan, any shipment headed there is suspect, said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, chief of UNODC's Europe and Asia section.

"If we find it there, we know there is something wrong," he said. "There is no legal excuse for it."

The chemical enables Afghanistan's drug lords to increase revenue dramatically by producing heroin in their own laboratories instead of shipping out raw opium to be processed elsewhere. According to Gen. Craddock, a kilo of opium fetches about $100, compared with $3,500 for heroin.

In late 2007, 10 tons of acetic anhydride were seized in the Russian city of Nizhni Novgorod. A 14-ton shipment was intercepted in March in Karachi, Pakistan, and in April, another 5 tons were confiscated at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Smaller shipments were stopped in several Central Asian countries, according to Mr. Lemahieu. The biggest haul came in Slovenia in June, when police seized 98 tons of the chemical in a shipment labeled "fabric softener" headed for Turkey, said Drago Menegalija, representative of the Slovenian police criminal division.

It all amounts to a fraction of what is used in labs, which need 1,300 tons to process about 5,000 tons of opium - 60 percent of the country's production - into 670 tons of morphine or heroin, according to UNODC.

Still, the operations appear to have slowed the flow of acetic anhydride into Afghanistan, said Rossen Popov, chief of precursors control at the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board, which is affiliated with the United Nations. As evidence, he cited attempts by smuggling networks to purchase substitute chemicals. There also has been a spike in sales of opium rather than heroin from the country, Mr. Costa said.

The yearlong investigation involved nine nations, including Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey, and focused on a criminal group that had bought 366 tons of acetic anhydride from a Czech company between 2004 and 2008, enough to produce 147 tons of pure heroin, Mr. Menegalija said.

The next step "is to identify and prosecute those responsible and to follow the money," said Mark Colhoun, a regional coordinator for UNODC based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. "It is definitely a cat-and-mouse game."