William Paty, who served as the British ambassador to Afghanistan until 2012, said Britain had lost the “war” against opium production in Afghanistan and heroin should be legalised.
Mr Paty served as the British Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012. He is a career diplomat who joined the Foreign Office in 1975.
In an article he wrote The Guardian todayPaty said that when Prime Minister Tony Blair “deployed British troops to Afghanistan, ending the illicit production and supply of opium was listed as a key objective.”
Of course, this was a lie then and it remains so now: when Tony Blair sent British troops to Afghanistan, the Taliban had almost completely stopped opium production there, and Britain's role in Afghanistan was undoubtedly to restart it.
Source: United Nations World Drug Report
To put this in numbers, in 2001, while Afghanistan was under Taliban control, opium production fell to 74 tonnes, down from 3,656 tonnes in 2000. The year after the UK intervention, production rose again to pre-2001 levels, and the following years saw a flurry of “record harvests” in mainstream media headlines.
Patty advocates for the legalization of heroin in the UK, arguing that legalization would lead to better control of heroin, which would in turn reduce demand for the opium.
But while he wants the drug trade to become a source of tax revenue for HMRC, he also seems to suggest that British troops are less effective than the Taliban, either because that is the case or because he is acknowledging that British government policy in Afghanistan has been to reopen Afghan opium production.
The former must be seen as an insult to any British military man. The latter? Well, that's probably close to the truth.
