Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Financial Times
June 27, 2008 By Jon Boone
Afghanistan’s opium barons remain at large partly because the world’s leading countries have failed to use far-reaching new powers of extradition, said the UN’s anti-narcotics chief.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said no one had yet taken advantage of UN resolutions designed to make it easier to extradite Afghan drug traffickers.
“It is perplexing and frustrating that we go all the way to introducing these measures at the Security Council but then nothing comes of it,” he said.
Mr Costa said there were “many reasons” why foreign powers had been reluctant to crack down on the leaders of Afghanistan’s $3bn a year drugs business, including the way traffickers get “mixed up with the insurgency and intelligence-sharing”.
The US has used drug smugglers as valuable sources of information, possibly agreeing to turn a blind eye to their activities.
Haji Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan warlord arrested in 2005, recently alleged that he had been promised he would not be apprehended if he travelled to the US if he supplied information about the financing of terrorist organisations in Afghanistan.
In December 2006 the UN Security Council passed a resolution allowing states to add drug traffickers to the “al-Qaeda and Taliban list” on the basis that some of their profits helped fund terrorism and the insurgency in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has received millions of dollars for counter-narcotics projects but arresting, prosecuting and convicting super-rich poppy barons in such a poor country has proved almost impossible.
Mr Costa said the number of leading drugs traffickers was low, in the “few dozen”, and many of them were well known.
But the Afghan police still lack the skills to build a water-tight case against such people.
And traffickers, who made $2.3bn (€1.5bn, £1.1bn) in 2006, can simply buy their freedom from underpaid policemen and judges.
June 27, 2008 By Jon Boone
Afghanistan’s opium barons remain at large partly because the world’s leading countries have failed to use far-reaching new powers of extradition, said the UN’s anti-narcotics chief.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said no one had yet taken advantage of UN resolutions designed to make it easier to extradite Afghan drug traffickers.
“It is perplexing and frustrating that we go all the way to introducing these measures at the Security Council but then nothing comes of it,” he said.
Mr Costa said there were “many reasons” why foreign powers had been reluctant to crack down on the leaders of Afghanistan’s $3bn a year drugs business, including the way traffickers get “mixed up with the insurgency and intelligence-sharing”.
The US has used drug smugglers as valuable sources of information, possibly agreeing to turn a blind eye to their activities.
Haji Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan warlord arrested in 2005, recently alleged that he had been promised he would not be apprehended if he travelled to the US if he supplied information about the financing of terrorist organisations in Afghanistan.
In December 2006 the UN Security Council passed a resolution allowing states to add drug traffickers to the “al-Qaeda and Taliban list” on the basis that some of their profits helped fund terrorism and the insurgency in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has received millions of dollars for counter-narcotics projects but arresting, prosecuting and convicting super-rich poppy barons in such a poor country has proved almost impossible.
Mr Costa said the number of leading drugs traffickers was low, in the “few dozen”, and many of them were well known.
But the Afghan police still lack the skills to build a water-tight case against such people.
And traffickers, who made $2.3bn (€1.5bn, £1.1bn) in 2006, can simply buy their freedom from underpaid policemen and judges.