Via the PakTribune: Top arrests soon to cut off Afghan drugs trade: US official

Some of the key players behind Afghanistan’s record-high opium trade are expected to be brought before court over the next year, a top US counter narcotics official said.The arrests would be vital to a strategy to stem the increasingly sophisticated narcotics trade before links between insurgents and drug traffickers become entrenched, Thomas A. Schweich said on Saturday.

“I think you are going to see some big people being prosecuted over the season … over the next 12 months,” the US deputy assistant secretary for international narcotics told reporters in Kabul.While

any such arrest is good news insofar as these are individuals who have seriously transgressed the law, one would think that at some point the claims of how given a arrest are going to seriously curtail the drug trade would stop being made.

As a point of reference: there have been major drug cartel busts in Colombia and Mexico for decades now, and yet the flow of drugs continues unabated. Even if it was possible to arrest every person involved in the drug trade at a given moment, the fact of the matter is that that would only create a temporary cessation in the drug trade itself. The demand for the substances would continue, and the money would flow. As such, new persons would emerge to cultivate the plants, process the materials and traffick the finished product.