NATO Finds More Evidence of Taliban-Opium Link in Afghanistan

[Lex]

Heavier weapons confiscated during recent drug raids in Afghanistan's southern opium-producing regions confirm growing links between drug trafficking and the country's Taliban insurgent movement, NATO officials said.
The stronger drug-and-weapons link comes as Taliban rebels and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) gear up for a widely expected clash this spring for control of southern Afghanistan, the Taliban's stronghold.
"We're seeing a growing link between opium cultivation [in Afghanistan] and the insurgency movement," NATO spokesman James Appathurai told reporters here March 28 after a meeting where senior U.S. and U.K. counternarcotics officials briefed representatives from the 37 ISAF nations about southern Afghanistan's rampant opium production. "More heavy weapons are being found when there are drug busts" by Afghan authorities.
More than 90 percent of the world's annual supply of opium, worth $3.1 billion, comes from Afghanistan.
While poppy production — the basis for opium — has been nearly eliminated in Afghanistan's northern provinces in the last two years, that effect has been more than reversed by rising production in its southern provinces, said Appathurai, adding that NATO estimates 15 percent of the country's population is engaged in cultivating the poppy plant.
The U.S. and British counternarcotics officials revealed to the ISAF nations that Afghan authorities are confiscating heavier weapons, such as mortars and machine guns, "in numbers that haven't been seen before," Appathurai said.
Though he could not confirm whether the confiscated weapons came from existing stocks inside Afghanistan or were freshly imported, Appahturai said that "increasingly the Taliban is protecting the opium trade, taking a cut and using the trade to fund the insurgency."
NATO reported March 27 that ISAF's force has risen by 7,000 to 39,000 soldiers since the alliance's summit in Riga in November, when allied officials called on the allies to fulfill their commitments of troops and equipment to enable ISAF to take on the Taliban.

By BROOKS TIGNER, BRUSSELS
DEFENCE NEWS
Posted 03/28/07 13:19