Afghan leader shields drug trade: ex-US official

NEW YORK - A former State Department official has accused Afghan officials, a reluctant military and divisions over policy, as much as the Taliban, of having contributed to a failing policy to fight narcotics in Afghanistan.

The government of President Hamid Karzai has shielded the cultivation of poppies from American eradication efforts, which the Pentagon and its international partners have not pursued aggressively, Thomas Schweich, who was the senior counternarcotics official in the United States Embassy in Kabul for two years, wrote in an article published in the New York Times Magazine.

The combined failure has turned Afghanistan into a virtual narco-state, he writes in the article, posted on the newspaper's website on Thursday.

Opium production skyrocketed in Afghanistan in 2006 and ’07, making the country the supplier of 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

Coming from an insider, the accusations are especially embarrassing to all concerned, but in particular to Karzai, whom Schweich accuses of protecting corrupt senior officials.

Schweich, now a visiting professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, says there is a lack of will within the Afghan government to prosecute corrupt officials who are benefiting from the drug trade for fear of losing their political support.

Narcotics corruption reaches right to the top of the government, and drug traffickers buy off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials around the country, he says.

Abdul Jabbar Sabit, the attorney general who was recently removed from his post, had a list of 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt, some of them tied to the narcotics trade, Schweich writes. But Sabit had been warned by Mr. Karzai to leave them alone, Mr. Schweich says.

The presidential spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, did not immediately reply to questions regarding Schweich’s allegations, but in a recent interview  Karzai rejected accusations that he was not serious about combating narcotics and government corruption. “Rarely is corruption beyond our means,” he said. “I fired someone yesterday.”