Afghan leader shields drug trade: ex-US official

The interdiction program is getting bigger and better, Wood added. Teams have closed twice as many drug laboratories so far this year as in all of 2007, he said.

Efforts to track and eventually prosecute drug traffickers are also much more robust, and more Drug Enforcement Administration officials are coming to Afghanistan, the ambassador said.

Schweich also lays blame for the failure of drug policy with the Pentagon and its NATO allies, who he writes want nothing to do with the effort to combat drugs.

The United States and the British military refused to assist in providing security for poppy eradication teams and to support a plan for aerial eradication using crop-dusters, he says. Following their lead, the Afghan Defense Ministry also did not help, he says.

Wood said the Afghan National Army did provide security on one occasion for a small pilot program. “It worked well enough, so we are going to do it better next year,” he said. “That’s a step forward.”

The military, he added, was focused on counterinsurgency and winning the trust and loyalty of the people, but there was a growing realization within the military that the narcotics trade was aggravating the security problems, he said.

Gen. Muhammad Daoud, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, who is in charge of the eradication teams, confirmed that his teams could not work where the insurgency was strongest if the military did not provide security.

Some 43 eradication officers were killed and 65 were wounded in attacks on his teams this year, including one linked to Al Qaeda, he said. Once, a rocket-propelled grenade landed less that 30 yards from his helicopter as he landed in Helmand, he said.

For that reason he said he supported aerial spraying in remote desert areas, where large poppy fields grow, and where damage to legal crops, animals and irrigation streams could be avoided.

But Afghan ministers said the cabinet decided against aerial spraying because of concerns from the ministers of health, agriculture and environment about the side effects of chemical spraying on the population, livestock and legal agriculture.