Afghan government accused of shielding opium trade

A former US government point-man in the drug war in Afghanistan has accused President Hamid Karzai's government of protecting the opium trade.

Thomas Schweich, who quit recently as US coordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan, said he discovered over the last two years "how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade -- by shielding it from American-designed policies.

"While it is true that Karzai's Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters," Schweich said in an article to be published in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday.

He also charged in the report, already on the newspaper's website, that Washington's NATO allies as well as the Pentagon had "resisted the anti-opium offensive."

The US Defense Department, he said, appeared "to see counter-narcotics as other people's business to be settled once the war-fighting is over in Afghanistan.

"The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs -- and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power," he said.

Schweich reserved his strongest criticism for Karzai.

The Afghan leader "was playing us like a fiddle," he said

"The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the US and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term," he said.

The State Department acknowledged Thursday that graft was hindering the drug war but saw no immediate need to review its counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan.

"I think corruption remains a problem in Afghanistan. We're working with the Afghan government to root it out through training and development of rule of law," department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said, responding to Schweich's criticism.