Drugs policy on hold in Afghanistan

Washington: US and allied combat troops will withhold efforts to destroy Afghanistan's narcotics industry, which finances the Taliban insurgency, unless Afghan government forces take the lead, a senior military officer said on Friday.

But with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai widely believed to be driven with corruption and its army and police units unable to conduct complex operations, the drug industry has flourished virtually untouched, military officers said.

Senior civilian and military officials have acknowledged that the US-led war in Afghanistan, launched by President George W. Bush weeks after the September 11 attacks in 2001, cannot be won unless the narcotics trade's stranglehold on Afghanistan is broken and insurgent sanctuaries in neighbouring Pakistan are eliminated.

"These things simply have not happened," Gen James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, told reporters on Friday. "I'd like to see, if and when we do contribute additional troops, that there is a direct means to get after these things." Until then, he said, "we have all the elements of a long-term insurgency."

For months, senior officials, including Adm Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have worked with Pakistan to find ways to reduce the radical militias' sanctuaries in that country's northwest region.

On Friday, as part of that effort, several missiles apparently fired from US drone aircraft struck two targets in North and South Waziristan.

The two strikes were the first taken under the Obama administration and seemed to signal that the practice of occasional attacks on militants in Pakistan, begun last August, will continue.

The Obama White House, in concert with the State Department and the Pentagon, is crafting a new strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, a process that is not complete, officials said. Key parts of the new strategy will deal with narcotics and the sanctuaries problem.

Senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House have long been concerned about Afghanistan's drug industry, which provides about 92 per cent of the world's heroin supply.

The cultivation of poppies and the processing and sale of heroin provide about $400 million (Dh1,469.40 million) a year to the Taliban and Al Qaida insurgents, according to United Nations and US intelligence officials.

The huge amounts of cash generated by the drug trade inevitably seep into the local and national police and government.

US officials have said corruption is rampant in Afghanistan and is a major reason many ordinary Afghans prefer the strict, if sometimes brutal, rule of the Taliban.