Afghanistan continued
The panel was established to make recommendations on how best to monitor a U.N. arms embargo and the closure of terrorist training camps.
U.N hypocrisy
It concluded that it was essential to look into the illicit drug trade because proceeds were being used to buy weapons and "finance the training of terrorists and support the operations of extremists in neighboring countries and beyond."
Laili Helms of New Jersey, an adviser to the Taliban in the United States, said most drugs go from the area controlled by the anti-Taliban opposition in the north to Tajikistan and Russia and most arms come in through the same route. There is no arms embargo on the opposition forces.
"I think their recommendations reflect the hypocrisy with which the United Nations has dealt with Afghanistan," she said.
Leading supplier
The Security Council froze Taliban assets and imposed an international flight ban on Ariana airlines in November 1999 to pressure the hardline militia to turn over suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.
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Bin Laden is charged in the twin U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in August 1998. The council then imposed an arms embargo on the Taliban, which controls about 95 percent of Afghanistan, in January.
The panel called for the establishment of international teams in countries neighboring Afghanistan to beef-up monitoring of the sanctions and a new U.N. office to oversee sanctions enforcement, possibly headquartered in Vienna.
The panel noted that Afghanistan supplied as much as 79 percent of the world's opium in 1999.
The Security Council is expected to consider the report's recommendations in early June, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
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