Pubdate: Wed, 02 Aug 2006
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Matthew Pennington, Associated Press Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

AFGHANISTAN ADVISED ON FIGHTING DRUG TRADE

KABUL, Afghanistan --Anti-drug police from Colombia have been touring 
Afghanistan to advise it on how to combat its booming illegal drug 
trade, officials said Tuesday.

A five-member team from Colombia, the world's leading producer of 
cocaine, has spent 10 days meeting counternarcotics police and 
officials around Afghanistan, the top heroin-producing nation.

Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, the chief of the Colombian team's drug 
interdiction unit, said they had been sharing their "expertise and 
experience" from 30 years of battling drugs and terrorist groups 
involved in the illicit trade, and may help train Afghans in the future.

"The problem you have here is very similar to what we have in 
Colombia," Atehortua said. "After a lot of mistakes in the war 
against drugs in our country, now we have a very good 
counternarcotics unit .. that is seizing a lot of drugs that are 
coming out of our country."

Last year, Colombian security forces confiscated a record 245 tons of 
cocaine, but U.S. drug officials believe that's no more than 20 
percent of the total successfully smuggled out of the country. 
Cultivation in Colombia of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, has 
dropped sharply since its peak in 2000, but has recently started 
increasing again.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in Western counternarcotics aid has 
yet to make a major impact in Afghanistan, which last year produced 
nearly 90 percent of the world's opium -- enough to make about 450 
tons of heroin.

Officials say the trade is fueling the Taliban-led insurgency 
wracking the south of the country.

Colombia has used aerial spraying of herbicides in its U.S.-backed 
war to destroy coca crops, an approach rejected so far in Afghanistan 
because of strong domestic opposition due to the impact it could have 
on the struggling rural economy.
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