Afghanistan, wrecked by 20 years of war and ruled by Islamic radicals and rival militias, now has one perverse claim to success. With this year’s bumper poppy crop, it became the world’s undisputed leader in the production of opium. The United Nations estimates that Afghanistan accounted for an astonishing three quarters of the global output in 1999, eclipsing the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Laos and Thailand. (United States estimates differ widely from the United Nations’, but also show Afghanistan leading all other producers this year.) Afghan heroin is feeding an already swollen population of junkies in neighboring Pakistan, which has nearly 2 million addicts, and also in Iran, Central Asia and Russia. As much as 90 percent of the heroin used in Europe originates in Afghanistan, and officials in the United States officials worry that increased quantities will soon find their way there. The radical Islamic Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan, meanwhile, is partly funding itself by taxing the opium trade.
This presents policymakers across the globe with a dilemma. How do you combat drug production in a country that, even if you ignore the heroin trade, already is treated like a pariah? The Taliban, which administers roughly 85 percent of Afghanistan, says it wants to cooperate with drug eradication efforts, but it lacks credibility. Only three countries in the world recognize its government: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It practices what the West calls “gender apartheid” by severely subjugating women. It has committed atrocities against minorities, including round-ups of ethnic Hazaras, some of whom have disappeared. And it harbors Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden, the alleged ringleader behind the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa last year that killed 224 people.
Intense diplomatic pressure on the Taliban has failed to extract concessions. In July, Washington banned all U.S. commerce with Afghanistan because of the Taliban’s refusal to turn over bin Laden. When that failed, the U.N. Security Council two weeks ago ordered a freeze on overseas accounts of Taliban leaders and imposed a ban on its airline. The Taliban was unyielding. “We will never hand over Osama bin Laden,” scoffed Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the Taliban’s foreign minister. “He will remain free in defiance of America.”
The Taliban can afford to be defiant, in part because the opium business provides it with both income and political leverage. To bring the trade to an end, Taliban mullahs argue, the United Nations should recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government and work with it on alternatives. In the meantime, it’s clear that by allowing opium production, the Taliban improves economic conditions in areas under its control, and attracts needed tax revenue to prosecute the war against its rivals.
For the record, Taliban officials say they oppose drugs, and rightly argue that poppy cultivation was part of the Afghan landscape long before the Taliban forced its rivals out of Kabul in 1996. The regime has its own drug czar, and it occasionally makes a show of destroying poppy fields or closing labs. Most recently, it ordered farmers to reduce their planting of poppies this season by 30 percent. It also admits to imposing a 10 percent usher–or religious tax–on the poppy crop. But officials argue that poppies are not a drug, and say the tax is no different from that charged on, say, wheat. Moreover, they insist they cannot afford–politically–to crack down on farmers. “We are against poppy cultivation, narcotics production and drugs,” says Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban representative in the United States. “But we cannot fight our own people. They are the sole source of our authority.”
That’s only a half truth. The fuller version is that the Taliban also earns taxes not only from poppies, but also directly from the heroin labs. Zuber, the addict who now lives in Peshawar’s European-run ORA clinic, says that his lab packed morphine base into six-kilogram bundles that were taxed about $55 per kilo by the Taliban. The daily tax revenue at that lab alone could amount to $5,500 in peak season–and the facility was one of 20 or 25 in the vicinity. NEWSWEEK has also examined photographs of official tax receipts from the heroin labs.
“Criminal elements, religious elements and official elements are all connected in the heroin trade like rice and honey,” says a law-enforcement agent for a Western government who has done undercover work in Afghanistan. Smugglers provide farmers credit in advance of their harvest–much needed in a country that has been largely destroyed–and mullahs sometimes say a blessing over an opium shipment before it travels. “You have a whole country re-orienting itself around this crop,” says David Mansfield, a U.N. drug-control researcher who conducts surveys in Afghanistan.
Unlike its Afghan rivals, the Taliban has provided a reasonable semblance of security in the areas it controls. It guarantees protection for traders, whatever their business. The Western law-enforcement agent, who requested anonymity, recalls an incident in 1996, when an opium-producing ring had a large shipment of a precursor chemical used in heroin refinement stolen en route through southern Helmand province. The group contacted Taliban authorities, who tracked the purloined property and promptly returned it. This source also says that he saw bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1995. At that time, he says, bin Laden’s mujahedin were helping to ship drugs across Iran to Turkey. (“There have been many reports that bin Laden is involved in narcotics trafficking, but they’re difficult to verify,” says a U.S. official. “We can’t even find out exactly where the guy is.”)
One of the largest drug barons in Kandahar, the Taliban capital, is a friend of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. According to Afghan and Western sources, Haji Bashar Mohammed fought side by side with Mullah Omar during the U.S.-backed jihad against Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Long after the Russians were chased out, when Mullah Omar began leading the Taliban militia, Bashar gave him his first cache of weapons. So when the Taliban marched into the Afghan capital of Kabul in 1996, Bashar was well placed to benefit. He moved his labs from Pakistan to Kandahar, and began driving around the city in a black Land Cruiser.
Smugglers buy opium at large bazaars that are the treacherous domain of criminal syndicates. One of the more infamous markets is located in the town of Sangin, a three-hour drive west of Kandahar. Bernard Frahi, head of the Islamabad office of the U.N. drug-control agency, visited there in October. Of about 500 shopkeepers crowded along one main street and two or three footpaths off it, he says, almost half sell opium. In front of shops they have scales, and inside they keep wet opium in plastic bags and dry opium stacked in large cakes. “One trader told me he sold 28,000 kilos of opium last year,” says Frahi–earning the merchant gross revenue of about $132,000. “Sangin is known as a dangerous place. It is known for people going in and not coming out.”
Even more dangerous are the border areas with Iran, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The United Nations is helping to create a drug-control agency in Tajikistan, while Iran is fighting what amounts to a war of attrition–by Tehran’s count, drug traffickers have killed more than 2,650 Iranian security personnel since 1983. In early November, more than 30 Iranian guards were killed in a single battle with a drug convoy. “The drug threat doesn’t recognize politics, boundaries or cultures,” says Vladimir Fenopetov, who oversees U.N. drug-control programs in Central Asia.
Leading European officials are bracing for a potential surge in heroin supply. “This will… have a direct and immediate impact on the streets of our cities and towns,” British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook warned last month. To help block the inflow, Britain has provided 300,000 to Iran to buy bulletproof vests for its border guards. It’s also expecting aggressive marketing by dealers. “There could be more free samples on offer [to expand the consumer pool],” says British drug czar Keith Hallawell. In France, authorities are worried about the purity of the Afghan heroin. “There could be a lot of overdoses,” says Alain Labrousse of the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues in Paris. Some European drug experts, however, point out that heroin consumption in Europe is stable–leading them to predict that Afghanistan’s surplus might go elsewhere.
Given the Taliban’s often harsh anti-Western rhetoric, some critics in the West wonder if the Taliban might have an ulterior motive in its drug policy–poisoning “infidels.” But the truth is that Afghan drugs likely are harming at least as many Muslims as they are non-Muslims. In Pakistan, addicts either shoot up or “chase the dragon” by smoking opium, and Iran has a swelling population of more than a million drug abusers.
Afghanistan, ironically, is better off than most countries in the region. Although addiction is a problem in parts of the country, it’s outlawed and not widespread, so opium farmers don’t often see the human effects of their trade. “Afghanistan is a poor, landlocked country,” says Ghulam Hazrat, who once worked as a high-school literature teacher, but now grows opium poppies on his family’s 100 acres. “In these past 20 years, the land wasn’t tilled right. Schools didn’t operate. The roads became bad. The only thing we have is opium.”
Other Afghan farmers say they’d be pleased to grow something else if they could make a dependable living from it. Sher Khan, a 28-year-old farmer in the village of Ghas Ge, planted his poppy crop three weeks ago on his modest acre-and-a-half field. He won’t get rich from it, but by Afghan standards he’ll do quite well–$3,000 to $4,000 by current prices. “The government promised to give us subsidized fertilizer and seed to grow wheat,” he said recently, as he plucked a green seedling from the earth. “But it never came. So we must grow opium.” The sprouts of Khan’s good fortune are, for many around the globe, a growing nightmare.
