Afghanistan's opium battle will take years: government

Afghanistan's government said Tuesday there is no silver bullet to halt the country's booming opium production, which is financing the Taliban insurgency. But the country's counter-narcotics minister, speaking at an event to mark the United Nations day against drug use and trafficking, vowed that the police and judiciary would soon start to effectively tackle the problem.
The UN released overnight its 2007 World Drug Report, which revealed a 49 percent leap last year in Afghanistan's production of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin.
It also reiterated that the country supplied 92 percent of the world's opium. "The issue of narcotics is a problem that cannot be solved in a year or two," said the minister, Habibullah Qaderi. "Afghanistan is a war-torn country," he said. "There is no proper infrastructure, there is no proper roads... each and every thing has fallen apart."
But he added that "as development takes place, as police reform grows (and) the judicial system improves, I can guarantee that there will be certainly in the future a reduction in the drugs problem."
The government was not considering using chemicals to eradicate opium poppy fields, he added. "Aerial and ground spraying were discussed last year and the Afghan government refused. There has not been discussion about it again," he said.
The United States has been pushing such methods but the Afghan government has resisted, in part because of concerns about its implications for peoples' health and livelihoods.
US ambassador William Wood told the event that about 10 percent of the heroin in his country was from Afghanistan and if this increased, Washington would consider a more "forceful response".
He did not elaborate but said this would be "based on consensus with the government of Afghanistan and international community." According to the UN report, about 62 percent of Afghanistan's opium crop, worth about three billion dollars a year, comes from the south of the country, where Taliban insurgents are the strongest.
"Narcotics are directly linked to terrorists. Drugs provide part of terrorists' expenses," presidential spokesman Karim Rahimi told journalists at a separate briefing. "Taking into consideration the demand and supply, the issue of drugs is an international problem and not only Afghanistan's," he said.