Iran said on Monday it was ready to help train Afghan police in fighting the drugs trade.

Iran offered at a U.N. meeting in The Hague on March 31 to assist Afghanistan in combating drugs, in a gesture to a U.S. call for regional support in Afghanistan that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as promising.

The United States and Iran have not had diplomatic ties for three decades and are now at odds over Tehran's nuclear plans.

Asked whether he envisaged Iranian and NATO forces working together against drug traffickers, Iran's police chief Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam told a news conference:

"We have had no talks with NATO and recognise only the government of Afghanistan ... We have made no pledge to foreign forces."

Last year, he accused NATO of mounting little more than a symbolic campaign against drug cultivation in Afghanistan, the world's largest opium producer and exporter.

Nearly eight years after the U.S.-led occupation to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, more than 70,000 U.S. and NATO troops are still there.

Iran, which shares a 900 km (560 mile) border with Afghanistan, is a smuggling conduit for drugs to the West from its neighbour. Up to 2 million people are estimated to use narcotics in the country of 70 million.

Iran seizing drugs

Ahmadi Moghaddam said Iran had helped Afghanistan control the border by building police outposts and had also "voiced our readiness" to train Afghan police.

"Improving stability in Afghanistan and its government is the most important factor to prevent the cultivation of narcotics in that country," he said.

Ahmadi Moghaddam said Iran in the year to March 20 had seized about a third of the 3,000 tonnes of drugs smuggled into the Islamic Republic from Afghanistan.

He said 14 police had been killed fighting smugglers during the same period, on top of about 3,600 security personnel killed during such operations since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.

"Wherever the Afghan government has sovereignty the cultivation of narcotics is either zero or minimal," Ahmadi Moghaddam said.

Reuters

Güncelleme Tarihi: 13 Nisan 2009, 17:39