Carolyn Cole LAT
The lure of drug money

The LA Times posts an interesting look at the age-old challenge to eliminating the drug trade - plain old fashioned corruption. It appears that we don't hear stories of interdictions of drug shipments in Afghanistan because they either don't get prosecuted or don't result in convictions.

One photo shows a prisoner wearing a flat, round pakol hat, standing in front of 10 pounds of opium packaged in plastic bags laid out on a table. Lt. Nyamatullah Nyamat took the picture on the February day he arrested the suspect. Hours later, the man was freed.

One of Nyamat's biggest catches, arrested with 114 pounds of heroin, a derivative of opium, hadn't even appeared in court when the local prosecutor let him go in late March..

Of course, it's our own fault.

U.S. troops forged alliances with warlords, who provided ground forces in the battle against the Taliban. Some of those allies are suspected of being among Afghanistan's biggest drug traffickers, controlling networks that include producers, criminal gangs and even members of the counter-narcotics police force. They are willing to make deals with remnants of the Taliban if the price is right.

The U.S.-backed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has brought some of those warlords into his popularly elected government, a recognition of their political clout and a calculated risk that keeping them close might make it easier to control them.

"Drug money is absolutely supporting terrorist groups," said Alexandre Schmidt, deputy head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan. And regardless of their allegiance, Schmidt said, most suspects are released within 48 hours because of intervention by higher authorities.

Putting the warlords into positions of power probably wasn't the best strategy.

Nyamat carries a handwritten list, four neatly folded pages, to record his losing score. Reading it recently, he shook his head in disgust. Only three of 17 suspects arrested this year were still in prison. "We have the complete ID list of all smugglers Â? but we cannot arrest them because they have the power now, not us," he said.

The list of those suspected of involvement in the drug trade reaches high into Karzai's government. Nyamat and an Afghan trafficker singled out Gen. Mohammed Daoud, a former warlord who is Afghanistan's deputy interior minister in charge of the anti-drug effort.

This why they focus on the poor farmers, who make a few thousand more by growing poppies but still barely enough to make ends meet. Eradication makes for great photo-ops and these little guys don't have friends in high places - they just have hordes of young children freezing to death in dirt floor shacks.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter who they go after though. As long as prohibition props up the exaggerated profits of the black market, there will be dealers. Take it from this guy who claims the "industry leaders" have a backlog in storage that will keep them in business for the next ten years even if they eradicate every last poppy in Afghanistan.

"The more restrictions, the more the business will boom," the trafficker said. "The price will go high, the number of dealers will go down, and my income will go up. The professional businessmen will remain. They have good connections. Whoever works hard in a business wins."

And the work is indeed hard but when you're at the top, there's no business like drug business to make money and you don't have to declare your earnings for tax purposes. There's always someone willing to take the risk.