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ANTONIO MARIA COSTA, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna, said that, since he had briefed the Council last year, the members had had the chance to see for themselves “the debilitating effects that drugs and crime have on Afghanistan”.  Briefing the Council today on the results of the latest opium crop survey carried out by his Office, he said that, while it was easy to be pessimistic about the opium situation, UNODC’s recently released Winter Assessment had revealed a new, possibly encouraging phenomenon:  divergent cultivation trends between the central-northern and southern areas of the country.

In the central-northern area of Afghanistan, security and development were slowly taking hold, he said, adding that UNODC’s experience in other parts of the world had shown that greater stability and more assistance would help farmers turn their backs on drug cultivation, which had been the case in the Andean region and in South-East Asia.  “It is now happening in parts of Afghanistan, where a balanced system of retribution and rewards is creating an opium-free belt across the middle of the country, from the border with Pakistan in the south-east to the border of Turkmenistan in the north-west,” he said.

He was especially happy about the establishment of a well-resourced Good Performance Fund to reward provincial administrations that eradicated poppy cultivation.  That could help lead to the doubling of the number of opium-free provinces from 6 in 2006 to 12.  If that happened, it could mean that a third of the country would be without opium cultivation by mid-2007.

But he said that the story was very different in the southern part of Afghanistan, where the vicious circle of drugs funding terrorism and terrorism supporting drug lords was stronger than ever.  The ever-increasing opium cultivation in five provinces in that region –- Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul and Nimroz –- was “an issue of insurgency as much as a drugs problem”.  He said it was therefore vital to fight them both together and with the same weapons, adding that, during a recent visit to Kabul, he had been glad to hear that both military and counter-narcotics agents now understood that argument and were developing complimentary rules of engagement.

“Afghanistan’s drug problem occurs in a security vacuum, where illicit crops co-exist with other criminal activities that support such cultivation -– foremost among them, the import of precursor chemicals needed to produce heroin, and the export of illicit proceeds derived from the opium economy,” he said, stressing that the relevant numbers were so big that their lack of detection was in itself a revealing story.  He asked the Council to consider that last year alone, more than 1,000 tons of acetic anhydride had been smuggled into Afghanistan, along with five times as many tons of other chemicals needed for drug refining.  Also over $3 billion in illicit drug money had been moved in the opposite direction, into havens where it was laundered and put out of the reach of authorities.

“Stemming these tides requires tighter border control in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries,” he said, stressing that, among other things, border management needed to be improved.  But at the moment, the Afghan Government was in no position to control its territory.  Therefore, neighbours and all those with a stake in stopping the flow of drugs, chemical precursors and money must help.  He said that UNODC had recently proposed a major initiative to assist Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan improve border management and anti-narcotic intelligence cooperation.  The initiative included physical structures such as border posts, trenches and containment walls, together with border security encampments.

He said that operational measures would also be improved, with joint interception exercises, intelligence-led investigations, common border liaison offices and compatible communications systems.  Controls at the sea boarders of Iran and Pakistan needed to be reinforced, together with better checks at freight crossings into Afghanistan, especially in the areas currently not patrolled.  “We envisage devoting special attention to container security and to the interception of cargos that are mislabelled to hide chemical precursors,” he added, urging Council members to support that proposal, to complement the vast ongoing bilateral assistance for security sector reform in Afghanistan, and its border management.

“We also need to bring major drug traffickers to justice,” he continued, applauding the Council’s decision last December to add major traffickers to the consolidated list of individuals and entities supporting Al-Qaida and the Taliban.  In general, the challenge was to strengthen Afghanistan’s criminal justice system and prosecute people who were profiting from drugs and crime.  In particular, he noted that Council resolution 1735 (2006) would make it easier to interdict the incipient Afghan drug cartels, prevent their leaders and operatives from travelling internationally, confiscate their assets and facilitate their arrest and extradition.

Turning finally to the issue of corruption, he said the Secretary-General’s latest report rightly recognized the cancer of corruption, bribery and dishonesty as major threats to Afghanistan, chiefly as they undermined the rule of law.  Those crimes were especially ominous as they lubricated the drug machinery and provided the context for criminal activity.  They also facilitated the evolution of the narco-economy into a tolerated form of enrichment, and helped illicit revenues sink their buying power into legal economic activity, Government structures and provincial administrations.

He noted that Afghanistan had recently ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption, and said that the overall goal was to help strengthen the country’s legal and administrative capability, and, among other things, educate a new generation of young and honest civil servants, and promote anti-corruption investigations, prosecutions and the recovery of illicit proceeds placed abroad.

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