Afghan drugs make Taliban tick
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Russia and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to combat drug trafficking when a bilateral Presidential Drug Trafficking Working Group recently met in Moscow, signing framework documents detailing the joint fight against illegal drug trade, prevention measures, treatment and rehabilitation of drug addicts.
The overarching goal, however, is to work out common strategy to combating the scourge of illegal drug trafficking on a global scale.
However, despite these ambitious tasks, there are a number of systemic differences hampering this much-needed cooperation between Moscow and Washington.
Vladimir Batyuk with the US and Canada Institute says that “Afghanistan is the world’s biggest drug state, which poses a direct security threat to Russia”.
“With this understanding in mind, we can’t just sit on our hands and watch illegal drugs streaming in from Afghanistan, which became a drug state in the full meaning of the word exactly during Operation Enduring Freedom exercised there by the US-led coalition in since 2001. Russia has every reason to say that the Americans and their NATO partners could have paid a lot more attention to this problem”, Batyuk says.
Russia has long been calling to destroy the opium poppy fields in Afghanistan, but the Americans argue that by doing so they would leave many Afghan peasants without any means of subsistence and, therefore, would encourage them to join the Taliban. The Americans believe it would be easier to cut off existing routes drug dealers use to bring their staff to European and global markets.
Many experts disagree, however, saying that the drug money is the main source of financing the Taliban insurgency. Russia, for its part, has more than once called to end the delivery to Afghanistan of chemicals used in the production of heroin.
One can only hope that the bilateral commission will work out a list of measures to eliminate the threat posed to the CIS countries and Europe by the ever-growing flow of illegal drugs from Afghanistan.
February 6, 2010
