Hit foreign link to heroin, Afghans ask allies

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Afghanistan's allies can and must do more to combat the smuggling of chemicals used to make heroin into Afghanistan, the world's largest opium producer and exporter, the counter narcotics minister said Wednesday.

"Let's work together against precursors," General Khodaidad told an international security conference, referring to chemicals used to turn opium into highly addictive heroin.

"Sixty-two intelligence agencies are active in Afghanistan, and we still cannot find the bad people! They are not doing their job very well," he said.

Afghanistan's poppy fields produce most of the world's opium, but Afghan officials say drug traffickers are increasingly using chemicals to convert it into heroin before it is shipped abroad, producing even greater profits for Afghan drug traffickers.

None of the chemicals, such as acetic anhydride, hydrochloric acid and acetone, are produced in Afghanistan and so must be obtained by the Taliban from foreign sources.

The U.N. Security Council in June 2008 urged member states to boost monitoring of the trade in precursor chemicals to stop their diversion for illicit use in Afghanistan.

Khodaidad said the response to the Council's appeal so far had been unimpressive, while on the ground the Taliban continued to reap large revenues.

"Last year almost $100 million went into the hands of the Taliban just for guns, ammunition, bombs, (protective) jackets, for killing Afghans and the soldiers of the international community," he said.

DRUGS FEED CORRUPTION

Khodaidad said Taliban insurgents had set up laboratories in lawless border areas to manufacture heroin that was then exported from the landlocked country via networks involving international criminal groups including the mafia.

The principal export routes were through Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, and the fledgling Afghan security forces were still too weak to monitor border areas sufficiently.

"At this stage our police, our law enforcement agencies, are under reform. It is very difficult at this stage for Afghanistan to control these routes," he told Reuters.

Foreign experts say the crop funds the insurgency and also fuels official corruption, both of which weaken state control over parts of the country and allow more drugs to be produced.

But Khodaidad said that while corruption in general was an obstacle, it was only part of a many-faceted security challenge to the Afghan state including its anti-narcotics efforts.

"We are not facing only one problem which is terrorism. We are fighting against narcotics, terrorism, warlordism, corruption, drug traffickers, you are fighting five or six types of war in Afghanistan. We are trying to disrupt the drug traffickers, their laboratories, their caches, their convoys."

While cultivation of the opium poppy stabilized or dropped in many parts of Afghanistan, five southern regions controlled by Taliban militants produced enough poppy to double the world's opium output between 2005 and 2007, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in its World Drug Report 2008.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)