Taliban takeover ‘massively hampers’ war against heroin
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has “massively” hampered efforts to stop heroin being imported to the UK, a law enforcement official said.
Chris Farrimond, director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency, told The Times that traditional intelligence capabilities “aren’t quite the same as they were” since the Taliban overthrew the western-backed government last August.
He said the lack of a UK presence meant it was impossible to know if supply of the drug would rise. There was a “high level of productivity” in the narcotics industry in Afghanistan before the takeover, he added. Demand for the drug in the UK is unlikely to rise as a result, however.
“You get a certain core of users within the UK who form that demand. It’s not necessarily the sort of recreational drug that people would go to,” Farrimond said. “So we have no intelligence at the moment to indicate that we are seeing an increase in heroin demand from the UK.”
But he said it is the lack of a UK presence in Afghanistan that has reduced Britain’s ability to identify and shut down organised criminal groups that are operating from the country. Asked whether the Taliban had disrupted the NCA’s intelligence channels, he said: “Massively. We can’t work in-country any longer.”
Afghanistan accounts for 80 per cent of the world’s heroin, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. This has made the economy dependent on narcotics and has hampered attempts to crack down on it by successive Afghan governments.
Ninety-five per cent of heroin found in Britain comes from Afghanistan. Baroness Goldie, a defence minister, has warned that Afghan heroin presents “a very significant issue for the UK” and said the failure to counter the flow from the country poses “a key threat to our national security interests”.
Heroin is the second biggest illicit drug imported into the UK after cocaine. But the NCA and its partners seized a much greater quantity of cocaine than heroin last year. About 15 per cent of cocaine destined for Europe ends up in the UK.
Farrimond said the NCA had helped to seize about 120,000kg of cocaine that was in or heading towards Europe last year. This compared with about 200kg of heroin that was seized. This discrepancy is largely owing to the different routes used to import each drug. Cocaine is easier to identify because it is predominantly being shipped by boat but there are many routes for heroin.
Farrimond said: “Heroin comes from Afghanistan and cocaine comes from Colombia. There are slight differences, but they are the bulk countries. The two routes are very different because if we take cocaine, there is really no choice: it has to come by boat, or by air and quite frequently, there’s a combination of the two.
“But the very large quantities come by boat and then they either come direct to the UK or come via Europe. If we’re looking at heroin, it’s a different proposition because the easiest or cheapest route for the traffickers to get it through is to bring it by land.”
Until 2011 the UK spearheaded efforts to reduce Afghanistan’s reliance on narcotics, such as by investing in programmes that sought to transition farmers out of opium cultivation on to other crops. Since then much of the work has focused on the NCA’s intelligence-gathering exercises that have targeted organised criminal groups in Afghanistan.
