Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Russia points to Dawood Ibrahim in Mumbai attacks
Indian newspapers are reporting that Russian intelligence says underworld don Dawood Ibrahim – an Indian national who India believes is living in Karachi in Pakistan — was involved in the Mumbai attacks.
The Indian Express quotes Russia’s federal anti-narcotics service director Viktor Ivanov as saying that Moscow believes that Dawood’s drug network, which runs through Afghanistan, was used to finance the attacks. Ivanov said these were a “burning example” of how the illegal drug trafficking network was used for carrying out militant attacks, the paper said, citing an interview in the official daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
The stories caught my eye not just because of the alleged link to Ibrahim, but because it highlights the extent to which Russian and Indian intelligence may be cooperating over Mumbai and on the wider issues over Afghanistan and the heroin trade. (A colleague in our Moscow bureau tells me that Ivanov is close to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and has good connections in the Russian intelligence community.)
“The gathered inputs testify that regional drug baron Dawood Ibrahim had provided his logistics network for preparing and carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks,” the Asian Age quoted Ivanov as saying. “The super profits of the narco-mafia through Afghan heroin trafficking have become a powerful source of financing organised crime and terrorist networks, destabilising the political systems, including in Central Asia and the Caucasus.”
The Times of India also quoted the special representative of the Russian president for international co-operation in the fight against terrorism, Anatoly Safonov, as saying the drug network was a joint problem for India and Russia.
Pakistan has historic reasons to fear any strengthening of Indian-Russian cooperation in Afghanistan. India and Russia both supported Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance when it was opposition to the country’s Pakistan-backed Taliban rulers, before they were thrown out by the U.S.-led invasion following 9/11. Their close relationship during the Cold War left Pakistan feeling particularly vulnerable during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 and 1989, when it faced India on its eastern border and Russian troops on its western border.
Afghan opium farmers follow the money
The rising cost of food that is stirring unrest in the developing world may have one positive spin-off: Afghanistan’s opium farmers, attracted by high wheat prices, may be turning to legal crops.
The Financial Times quotes a recent commander of British forces in Helmand, the heartland of the country’s drugs trade, as saying there is anectodal evidence of such a switch in the southern province. With wheat prices at record highs farmers are calculating they will make money planting the crop, says Brigadier Andrew MacKay.
But he adds, though, that this doesn’t mean that the tide has turned in the fight against the drug industry in Afghanistan, producing 93 percent of the world’s opium which is processed to make heroin and exported around the world.
Afghanistan’s opium crop is forecast to shrink by as much as half this year after 2007′s record harvest, but then this fall is not so much the result of international anti-narcotics efforts but mainly because of an unusally cold and dry winter that has disrupted germination of seeds.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation also cautions against reaching hasty conclusions, arguing that the profits from planting opium poppies are still high, so there might not be a very compelling incentive for farmers to make the change.
Also, looked at in another way, high food prices might actually drive desperate farmers to grow more opium to feed their families. Already Afghanistan, largely reliant on imports of wheat and flour, is reeling under the impact of high global prices and people have taken to the streets to protest.
Pakistan benefits directly from the narcotics trade as most of the opium and heroine passes across the Pakistani border and is then shipped to the West from Pakistani ports. Along the way, Pakistani officials take their cut. Some of this money is used to train Pakistani terrorists,
The US must use all means necessary to stop this trade which is killing thousands of Americans each month. The US should both destroy the Afghan poppy fields and the trade routes into and out of Pakistan.
FBI recommendation:
india should first find its black sheeps, fingure pointing any other country does not obsolve ones responsibility to protect its citizens. source New Dehli Times.