NARCOTICS AND ARMS TRAFFICKING IN AFGHANISTAN
This research paper describes and analyzes drug and arms trafficking in Afghanistan since 1973, places them in historical context, examines their effects outside of Afghanistan and discusses possible remedial solutions to the problems they have created.
Over the past thirty years, Afghanistan has sustained itself largely from the proceeds of a clandestine or black market economy based on the production, processing and export of opium, heroin and other narcotic drugs and the smuggling of arms and other goods. These activities have developed out of the devastation, political fragmentation and economic dislocation produced by nearly thirty years of civil unrest and the Soviet invasion and ten year occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989), and their tumultuous and violent aftermath. The drug and arms trade and associated political extremism have had seriously deleterious effects on the nations thereby impacted by them, especially those which border Afghanistan. As the events of September 11, 2001 demonstrate, the close nexus between illicit narcotics and arms sales and terrorism suggest that they are an inseparable part of an immediate and serious threat to political stability in the region and elsewhere. Past efforts to curb such operations have been undertaken on a piecemeal basis. Effective solutions require a much higher degree of internal unity within Afghanistan and international cooperation than it has been possible to attain in the recent past.
Over its long history, the course of events within Afghanistan has been powerfully influenced by its geographic location, forbidding high mountainous, rocky and barren terrain, at the crossroads of Central, West, and South Asia and astride the traditional invasion route into India from Central Asia and Persia. Overrun and occupied by more powerful foreign powers, including the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, Persians, Mongols and...