By Charlene Porter
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Terrorism, narcotics trafficking and organized crime form "another axis of evil," according to Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP). Speaking to a Washington audience September 25, Costa said recognition of the interrelationship between these three criminal activities requires law enforcement, international agencies and governments to reexamine what they do to combat them.

He called the current structure of governments' anti-crime agencies compartmentalized, and suggested that must change. "It's not easy, but we've got to have the stamina, the vision, the ability to put those things together."

Costa took the post at UNODCCCP only last May, and so is engaged in a broad reevaluation of how international anti-crime efforts have been conducted. Costa said counter-narcotics strategies must recognize the social and economic conditions motivating people to use or sell drugs.

"Problems always have much deeper roots, and consequences are usually far-reaching," Costa said in a Washington appearance sponsored by the Better World Campaign, a U.S.-based nonprofit education and outreach organization working to support the work of the United Nations and its agencies.

Costa was in Washington for meetings with U.S. officials in both the Congress and the Bush administration where he found assent in his ideas about the need for a more holistic approach in counter-narcotics and anti-crime efforts.

"There is a recognition that without advocacy, without prevention, without therapy, there can not be a success. . . against the drug problem," the UNODCCP director said of his meetings with U.S. officials.

Events in Afghanistan have demonstrated to the world how narcotics, crime and terror are allied, Costa said, adding a race is now underway for the Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan to establish the credibility and capability to break this triangle. Since the fall of the Taliban and the rise of the new government, President Karzai's administration has emphasized its commitment to fight cultivation, processing, trafficking and abuse of illicit drugs.

Afghanistan was the world's biggest source of heroin throughout the 1990's. Though the Taliban stopped cultivation in 2001, an UNODCCP survey conducted in February 2002 found that opium poppy had resumed its former preeminence as an important cash crop. Costa said a second soon-to-be-completed survey will show that poppy cultivation is concentrated in a few provinces: Qandahar, Helmand, Badakhshan, and Nangarhar.

UNODCCP is working with the administration of President Karzai to help establish a counter-narcotics agency and criminal and civil codes of law which did not exist under the Taliban, Costa said.

In this process, however, he re-emphasized the need for a holistic approach to attacking the drug problem, and for recognition that Afghan farmers are growing opium poppy because they have "profound economic reasoning." In education and professional background, Costa is an economist, and he said UNODCCP is currently completing research, which will demonstrate that Afghan poppy cultivation was governed by a sophisticated system of contracts, lending, and futures pricing.

Costa said UNODCCP and international donors must also work to help farmers find alternate livelihoods. "Basically, helping farmers to kick the habit. That is hard to kick, as hard as the habit of consuming the narcotics," Costa said.

Controlling demand is the third component of UNODCCP's work in Afghanistan, Costa said. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are addicted to narcotics, he said, a problem that was not acknowledged under the repressive Taliban regime, and certainly not addressed.

While events of the last year have focused significant attention on Afghanistan, Costa said drug trafficking is a regional issue in Central Asia that is going to require commitments from all governments.

On the wider view, Costa said, "All the countries in the world are part of the problem." Some past analyses of the global drug problem have characterized some nations as part of the problem and others as part of the solution, but the Italian-born UNODCCP director said, "Ain't as easy as that any more."