Drug trade could splinter Afghanistan into fragmented criminal state – UN

UN expert warns west of danger of not stepping up efforts to tackle opium production in Afghanistan after record $1bn harvest

Afghanistan's booming narcotics trade risks splintering the country into a "fragmented, criminal state" if the government and its western allies do not step up efforts to tackle opium production and the illicit economy it supports, a senior UN official warned.

Opium farming in Afghanistan, the world's main producer of the drug, hit a record high last year, with farmers harvesting a crop worth nearly $1bn (£610m) to them, and far more to the traffickers who take about four-fifths of the profit.

There are no miracle cures. A transformation of the corrupt economy could take up to two decades, and opium production is likely to climb beyond 2013's worrying levels before it falls again, said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, outgoing head of the UN office on drugs and crime in Afghanistan.

But he still sees cause for hope in the transformation of the narcotics police into a disciplined and relatively well respected force, an increase in treatment for Afghan addicts, and the government's recent crackdown on powerful officials linked to the drugs trade including the arrest of a top police officer.

"If no appropriate action is taken, then Afghanistan runs the risk of becoming a fragmented criminal state, ruled by an illicit economy," Lemahieu told the Guardian after five years grappling with Afghanistan's narcotics problem, as well as interlinked issues from government corruption to other criminal enterprises like illegal logging. "It is not too late, but we need to act decisively."

Feverish concerns about the future are helping keep prices high despite a glut. Negotiations over a deal to keep US forces here after 2014 have been stalled by tensions between Kabul and Washington, and no one knows who will be running the country after a presidential poll set for April, which the incumbent President Hamid Karzai is barred from contesting.

"At this moment there is more opium being produced in Afghanistan than is required for the outside market," Lemahieu said. "It is domestic speculation coping with uncertain times and compensating for declining international money flows within the country."

The cash is vital for all the officials and their supporters counting on the drugs for unorthodox campaign finance during presidential elections this year and parliamentary ones in 2015. When those are over, and there is more certainty about what Afghanistan might look like after foreign troops have left and Karzai has been replaced, prices may finally start to come down to levels justified by demand, he said. But the trade will not end even with prices at half current levels, until the international community reverses years of neglect and marginalisation and treats counter-narcotics as a problem that runs across all development efforts.

"The security agenda and short-term ideas of success didn't go well with the ideas of counter-narcotics work," Lemaheiu said, pointing out that in some areas the military event blocked counter-narcotics efforts, worried that they could alienate local power brokers or drive farmers into the arms of insurgents. "For the international military, counter-narcotics went against their aim of winning hearts and minds," he added.

The drugs trade ties together the Taliban and many of the corrupt officials inside Afghanistan, whose bank accounts were swollen by the tide of western dollars poured into efforts to pacify and rebuild the country. As foreign cash dries up on the back of the troop withdrawal, businessmen and the officials they paid off are looking for other sources of cash. The government recently arrested the police chief of western Nimroz province on suspicion of ties to the drug trade; a long and porous border with Iran makes the sparsely populated desert province one of the main smuggling routes out of the country. The Taliban are also more reliant on poppies for financing than ever before, as conflict in the Middle East sucks away some of the donations from rich sympathisers that once poured into their coffers.

"Not all in the Taliban are happy about the drug business, but undeniably too many of them are involved. Not all connected to the government applaud the corruption and the drug business, but no doubt too many have their hands in the pot," Lemahieu said. "And the ones who are involved on both sides know each others' phone numbers, they find each other."

Despite opium's duel role fuelling the insurgency and a large portion of much-resented government corruption, poppy eradication still does not feature on a list of national priorities drawn up by Kabul. Major donors show little more interest; counter-narcotics is barely mentioned in a pact detailing aid priorities for the government and its backers over the next decade that was drawn up in Tokyo two years ago.

"We have to understand that doing nothing on the illicit economy will defeat the security and development agendas," Lemahieu said. "If the governance system would work properly, then external threats might be easier to cope with."

Change must involve slow work with communities that grow opium, offering them improvements in quality of life to compensate for the drop-off in income that is an inevitable result of ending drug production, said Lemahieu, who helped coordinate a successful reduction in opium cultivation in Burma before moving to Afghanistan. No other crop can match the financial returns from poppies, but in a possible sign that development and curbing the trade are linked, far more children are in school in areas where there is no poppy than in farming communities that cultivate the drug.

"If you can work on other factors you can prepare a community to have less income but still a similar or better quality of life: access to agricultural services and markets, food security, other income within the extended family, clinics, schools, irrigation," Lemaheiu said.

However any change will be slow, not least because of the impact of ending opium cultivation on rural jobs. The crop employs five times as many people as wheat farming, in a country with hundreds of thousands of young people flooding out of school to look for jobs each year.

"We need to be persistent. Political courage is required and supporting those who want to make a change … understanding that real solutions are feasible," Lemahieu said.

"Yet if one moves too fast, in the belief that fast-track immediate solutions are within reach, one may end up doing more harm than good. One cannot pull the rug from under an employment market that already has to absorb up to half a million new entrants each year."