(NSI News Source Info) April 14, 2009: Tehran has offered to help train police forces in Afghanistan as part of a promise to help the reconstruction of the war-torn country.
Asked Monday whether Iran would opt for military cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to help Afghanistan, Iranian police commander Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam responded that Tehran does not attach authority to the alliance. 
Head of the Iranian anti-narcotics squad, Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, said that even the young Afghan government has been more influential in curbing drug cultivation than the NATO alliance.
"We only recognize the government of Afghanistan and we therefore pursue this issue only through the channel of government authorities," he said.
Iran -- which neighbors Afghanistan -- believes that over sevens years of US intervention in Afghanistan has not been negative for the establishment of calm in the country.
While Washington and Britain began the war to topple the Taliban regime and bring to justice the culprits of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil, the Taliban continue their violent attacks and the al-Qaeda is still at large.
The invasion of Afghanistan was also justified as part of the West's "war on drugs".
"The al-Qaeda network and the Taliban regime are funded in large part [by] the drugs trade," ex-British prime minister Tony Blair said in 2001 when confirming London's participation in the US attack on Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has nevertheless become the second biggest opium producer and now supplies the world with 90 percent of its illegal drugs, the UN drugs monitoring body said in a March report. The NATO failure to curb the drug production that bankrolls the insurgency has put Iran in center stage and has forced the country to intensify a war of its own.
Iran has dug huge trenches on its border to slow down the drug smugglers, who have killed more than 3,600 Iranian law enforcement officers in the past two decades. While being credited by the UN for the seizure of 80 per cent of the opium netted around the world in 2007, Iran has also taken action to impart its experiences in fighting drugs to Afghanistan.
"We have declared our readiness to train Afghan police," Ahmadi Moghaddam told the press on Monday. According to the police commander, NATO forces have only played a "symbolic role" in confronting drug cultivation.
"Wherever the Afghan government has sovereignty the cultivation of narcotics is either zero or minimal," Ahmadi Moghaddam explained.
The official said Iran in the Iranian year to March 20 had seized about a third of the 3,000 tons of drugs smuggled into the Islamic Republic from Afghanistan.
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