Opium Wars
A key step to securing peace will be to wean Afghan farmers off
growing poppies.
The chief of police has a memorable way of demonstrating that
he’s not afraid of the drug smugglers. He holds up his right hand,
revealing the absence of his middle finger. Four years ago, Brig.
Gen. Aqa Noor Kintuz was hired as provincial chief of police in the
northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan and charged with
destroying its plentiful poppy fields. “After I finished one of the
first eradications,” he says, “my vehicle was blown up by a
remote-control bomb.” He rolls up his right shirtsleeve. His
forearm is badly mangled. In the years since, he has received
innumerable death threats. Women and children of poppy farmers have
hurled stones at his policemen. One of his eradication tractors was
torched.
The grim axiom defining today’s Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose
citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling
revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the
country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium
trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to
fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan
government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside
world’s largesse to continue, the national economy’s addiction to
opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as
this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world’s leading
opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan’s poppy mind-set
promises to be a complicated endeavor.
In Badakhshan, chief of police Kintuz appears to be making some
headway against poppies. Five years ago the province was
Afghanistan’s second-biggest opium producer, after the
Taliban-controlled province of Helmand. For a brief period after a
Taliban ban on poppies in 2000, Badakhshan even took the lead in
poppy cultivation, because the province was controlled by the
Northern Alliance militias, rather than the Taliban. When Kintuz
started his job in 2007, 9,000 acres were planted with poppies. Two
years later fewer than 1,500 were.
Eradication efforts have forced poppy farmers into the margins
of the countryside. Their fields are, by design, all but invisible.
To find one, you must drive for hours on a crumbled and isolated
mountainside road, accompanied by someone who knows the district
and will if necessary explain your presence there. You must look
far from the roadside, gazing over the rolling terra incognita of
northern Afghanistan—studying its monochromatic creases for that
rogue burst of color, simultaneously innocent and obscene, that
finally screams out what it can only be: a field of poppies.
A farmer squats with his back to the flowers, weeding an
adjacent field. He is a 37-year-old man with the distinct Mongolian
features characteristic of the borderlands, and he wears a brown
tunic, a turban, and a tentative smile. He introduces himself as
Mohammed Khalid. He acknowledges that the poppy field is his.
“My father taught me how to grow poppies ten years ago,” he
says. “Until this year, I was able to produce 60 pounds of opium
from my farmland.” Crouching while his fingertips brush against the
tilled soil, Khalid describes how the smugglers would advance him
the money for his crop and how a half-dozen members of his family
would join him in the fields to weed, thin, and finally harvest the
inky opium paste from the poppy bulbs—a four-month season of tedium
that he hardly begrudged, given the benefits. The bricks of opium
that he wrapped in plastic and took to the market would pay for all
the food his family needed. In addition, the farmer would use the
seeds to make cooking oil and burn the stalks as firewood and for
ash to make soap. “It provided everything,” he says.
With the relentless eradication, Khalid has come up with a
strategy. His most visible farmland, the area he is now weeding,
will hereafter be used for wheat and melons. Only the sliver of
land that is almost impossible to see from the road will remain the
sanctum of his high-value crop. “From that small field,” he says
with a glance over his shoulder at the riotous profusion of violet
and pink and white, “I’ll get about two pounds of opium. Maybe
$80.”
Possessing only the barest sense that he has become the hinge on
which Afghanistan’s future and America’s national security
interests swing, Khalid frowns and says, “I have no idea why
they’re eradicating. I’m just a poor farmer, and all I have time to
think about is how to feed my family.”
One morning during harvest season, Chief Kintuz and his team
conduct a poppy eradication in the Argo district of Badakhshan,
just two days after nine members of his counter-narcotics force
were killed by a roadside bomb in Darayem. At dawn the convoy sets
out from the provincial capital of Feyzabad—driving past clusters
of newish houses built in the days before eradication brought such
construction to a halt. Thanks to Chief Kintuz’s efforts, this
undulating countryside no longer features endless vistas of
poppies.
The nine-mile road to Argo is a splintered mess—deterioration
has left it worse now than it had been before a U.S. subcontractor
was paid $2.5 million to resurface it. Rolling through the district
center, past dozens of shuttered shops where opium was once sold
openly, the convoy is greeted with hard stares from the villagers.
A few miles beyond Argo, near the village of Barlas, the 30 or so
armed counter-narcotics officers dismount their vehicles. The men
set out on foot into the hills, searching for sequestered
poppies.
The fields are everywhere: dozens upon dozens of crazy-colored
tracts, none larger than an acre. The officers descend on them with
bamboo canes and swing away at the flowers, reaper-like. The chief
bashes away as well. A surveyor from the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC) faithfully records each obliterated site on
his clipboard. A young farmer watches the havoc while crouching in
his field. “That land belongs to my neighbor Israyel,” he says. “I
think he knew they were coming and didn’t want to be around to see
it. The police warned us last year not to plant poppy. So I’ve
switched to melon. But all of this is rain-fed land, so if there’s
a drought, I’ve got a real problem.”
I ask if he or his neighbors have received any of the millions
of dollars being poured into Badakhshan Province by the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) and other Western
organizations in an attempt to lure Afghan farmers away from
poppies. “They promised the Argo district’s governor that they’d
give us bags of wheat seed and fertilizer,” he replies. “But they
haven’t.” The remark is similar to one by an elder of the nearby
Tashkan district: “The government said, ‘We’ll build roads,
bridges, and canals, and you’ll forget poppies forever.’ That was
five years ago. They’ve done nothing.”
In fairness, several things have been done—a newly paved highway
from Feyzabad to Kabul, road construction projects in Tashkan, a
saffron farm in Baharak, and 18 new district police offices. But
for every worthy project scattered throughout this vast northern
province is a village like Sar Ab in Yamgan district, where the
lack of a medical clinic led residents to use opium as their only
medicine until half of the 1,800 villagers became addicts. Or the
village of Du Ghalat, in Argo, where a hundred children huddle like
cattle on the dirt floor of a collapsing schoolhouse built with
opium money that has dried up as poppy eradication proceeds. Or the
millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars earmarked to fund agricultural
projects in Badakhshan, which, according to one counter-narcotics
official, “never got here—it disappeared.”
The team advances to another field, and from a crumbling house a
woman emerges, shrieking, “For God’s sake, don’t destroy it! We
don’t have anything else!” The men say nothing and keep swinging. A
few minutes later, they discover another poppy field, surrounded by
brick walls. Two small children stand against the wall, crying
loudly as the officers approach. An older sister tries to comfort
them as their mother hollers, “These children have no father! How
will I provide for them now?”
The chief looks stricken. Lowering his cane, he walks up to the
older girl, murmurs a few sympathetic words and presses a few
Afghan dollars into her hand.
“Give his money back!” the mother hisses.
The officers move on to another widow’s poppy field. She sits on
a mule sobbing while they undo the labor of her dead husband—who
she says had been a mujahideen against the Soviets and more
recently fought the Taliban as a member of the Afghan National Army
before being killed by a roadside bomb this past winter. As we
proceed, I notice that the poppy bulbs in some of the razed fields
bear telltale slash marks, indicating that their opium resin had
been harvested before our arrival. I also notice fields that are
plainly visible but go untouched. Are these oversights? Or has
someone been bribed?
As the chief and his officers repose under trees after an
elaborate picnic lunch of goat, chicken, yogurt, and fresh
vegetables filched from nearby fields, I ask the chief if some of
his own men may be involved in the opium trafficking.
“Yes, there are a few,” he says quietly. “But let’s talk about
this later.” When I remind him of his words the next week, the
chief says he has purged his department of crooked cops. He says he
does not know of any elected officials in Badakhshan involved in
smuggling—”otherwise, I would have arrested them.” I do not tell
him that other sources have fingered a prominent official as a
smuggler, as well as another smuggler who was a candidate for the
parliament, offering to pay for votes and telling farmers that if
elected he would ensure that opium production will continue. Even
as Badakhshan becomes poppy free, local commanders and government
officials have allegedly reached power-sharing agreements over drug
routes taking opium across the northern border into Central Asia.
The Afghan economy, even here in the non-Taliban controlled areas
of the north, remains reliant on the drug trade.
In Feyzabad I interview a man believed to be one of the
province’s biggest drug smugglers. He will not confirm he is
associated with the opium trade. But he tells me matter-of-factly,
“Someone who just smuggles on his own isn’t going to succeed. He
has to have relationships with someone—like the district or
provincial police chief.”
For centuries, opium wafted over Afghanistan before engulfing it
altogether. Though Alexander the Great could not totally conquer
this rugged northeastern flank of the Persian Empire in the fourth
century B.C., he is credited with leaving behind the drug that
ultimately would. Actual cultivation of poppy shows up in
Afghanistan’s recorded history about 300 years ago. It was a crop
well suited to the loamy soils of Badakhshan and the eastern
province of Nangarhar, where it was first grown—requiring little
fertilization and rainfall, a short growing season, and about as
much expertise as it takes to hand-scatter seeds and cut slits in a
bulb. Poppy occupied a benign niche in the country’s agrarian
culture throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, even as India’s
stranglehold over the opium trade later gave way to Turkey and then
to the highlands of Southeast Asia, thanks to the growing market
for heroin in Europe and the United States.
Only in the middle of the 20th century did Afghanistan become an
opium exporter. At the request of the United Nations, which
Afghanistan joined in 1946, King Mohammad Zahir Shah temporarily
halted cultivation. The subsistence poppy farmers of Badakhshan and
Nangarhar persuaded him to reverse his decision. In the meantime
the crops for which Afghan farmers achieved renown were pistachios,
almonds, pomegranates, cotton, and grapes.
So it was, until the Soviet invasion of December 1979 upended
Afghanistan’s landscape. The new occupiers closed off the markets
for several of the country’s fruits and shut down the cotton gins
so as to benefit Uzbekistan’s exports. The ensuing decade-long war
between the Soviets and the U.S.-backed mujahideen claimed
farm-to-market roads, irrigation canals, silos, and food processing
factories among its victims. Afghanistan’s agriculture was ruined.
Between the U.S.S.R.’s withdrawal in 1989 and the Taliban’s
emergence in 1994, the country descended into chaos as warlords
competed for power. Afghan farmers, struggling to regain their
standing in the marketplace, discovered that India and Pakistan had
developed their own products and were no longer interested in
importing Afghanistan’s. Those countries had succeeded in cracking
down on their own opium production—and drug smugglers began to eye
new pockets of instability where illegal trafficking could thrive.
Operatives from Pakistan showed up in Nangarhar, then Badakhshan,
then the southern province of Helmand. As agricultural consultant
Jonathan Greenham describes his work in Pakistan to eradicate its
opium production, “We just pushed the problem across the
border.”
These are among the reasons Afghanistan’s share of worldwide
opium production skyrocketed from 19 percent in 1986 to 90 percent
two decades later. The greatest factor, however, was the Taliban.
When it first came to power in 1996, the new Islamist government
garnered support from tribal leaders by agreeing not to crack down
on poppy cultivation. The supreme leader, Mullah Omar, received
regular funding from trafficking groups, which he allowed to
operate freely. At the same time, the new Afghan government levied
a 10 percent tax on all agricultural profits. By 1999 Afghan opium
production spiked to more than 5,000 tons, prompting pressure from
the UNODC for a crackdown.
In July 2000 Mullah Omar issued a fatwa, or religious decree,
declaring opium production a violation of Islam. The Taliban
enforced the ban with brutal efficiency, as one former poppy farmer
told me, “by threatening to set your house on fire.” The result was
a massive 91 percent reduction in poppy growing in one year.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the
Taliban in 2001, regional warlords once again cranked up opium
production. No longer in power, the Taliban now saw opium as a way
to fund their insurgency. “They saw the opportunity to generate a
tremendous amount of income without sacrificing the subsistence of
the people,” says Wes Harris of the United States Department of
Agriculture. Poppy is a winter crop, so after the harvest in late
spring, a farmer can plant corn, cotton, or beans in the same soil.
During years when demand is high, a farmer might make as much as
six times more from opium than he would from another crop. When the
price of opium is low, the farmer can simply wrap his durable
product in plastic and store it until the market is more lucrative.
It is now believed that the Taliban had a large stockpile of opium
when they enforced their ban in 2000 and were deliberately
curtailing supply to drive up prices.
As the Taliban have gained control of southern Afghanistan over
the past several years, growing poppies has only gotten easier.
Drug traffickers advance farmers money for the harvest and later
arrive to pick up the product. The drug mafia sees to it that the
routes to heroin processing labs in the borderlands and then out of
Afghanistan are well cleared and the appropriate individuals bought
off—since, as one veteran Afghan law enforcement official puts it,
“Afghanistan is controlled by the drug mafia. How else do you think
those people in the government with their low-paying salaries
bought their fancy houses in Dubai and the U.S. in the past few
years?”
NATO estimates that insurgents get half of
their financing from drugs, nearly half a billion dollars. But with
Afghanistan’s opium economy totaling up to four billion dollars a
year, the Taliban command only a fraction of that enormous sum.
A conundrum still looms for the poppy farmer: Opium is haram, or
forbidden by Islam, as the Taliban decreed when they temporarily
halted its cultivation. Or is it? Some Afghan mullahs postulate it
is haram only to use opium, not to produce it. Other mullahs cite
the Koran’s proviso that a starving man may eat haram meat in order
to survive. But the religious director of Badakhshan Province,
Maulawi Abdul Wali Arshad, says, “We have a law in Islam: Whenever
something is illegal, it is illegal from beginning to end. If poppy
cultivation is legal, then how do we control opium smuggling? Or
opium use? What the Taliban are doing isn’t Islamic. The Taliban’s
involvement with the drug mafia shows that they don’t want a truly
Islamic government. They just want power.”
Helmand Province is the Taliban’s stronghold and ground zero for
Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation. It is the place where Americans,
in a massive development project after World War II, built an
irrigation system that still functions—but only because Afghan
farmers have fashioned canals to bypass the clogged main arteries.
They direct water to this or that farm simply by pushing aside a
pile of mud with a hoe. As one USAID
irrigation specialist said as we watched water gush from a canal
across a brutally arid landscape, “Amazing, isn’t it, to see this
when we’re basically in the 13th century?”
There is ample agricultural ingenuity to be harnessed here. In
Marjah, where the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
arrived in February 2010, first to uproot the Taliban and then to
win the hearts and minds of the locals, the U.S. marines who
surveyed Marjah’s poppy fields gazed in wonderment at the desert
lands ablaze in Wizard of Oz Technicolor. Many of the young men
were from farming communities and could not help but admire the
acumen of their Helmand counterparts. Wes Harris is impressed by
how the farmers manage to grow soybeans and cotton side by side and
to cascade grapevines down desert berms—”using every square
centimeter to some end,” he says.
Given that Marjah’s Helmand Province is the source of 54 percent
of Afghanistan’s opium, the subtext of last year’s campaign was
clear to all. Far less clear is whether it’s working. Operating
under the belief that previous forced eradications in Helmand only
alienated the farmers and flung them into the sympathetic bosom of
the Taliban, the Marines announced last spring that they would pay
farmers to eradicate their own crops—$300 per destroyed acre. A
substantial number flatly refused to participate. Many of those who
did sign on failed to meet the seven-day deadline for the
eradication. In a good-faith gesture, the deadline was
extended—giving some farmers enough time to first harvest the
opium, then collect their check from ISAF.
(“Did they turn the poppies over in mid-stride and sneak some past
us? Probably so,” one military source conceded.) But luck was on
the Marines’ side: 2010 was a bad growing season for Helmand’s
poppy farmers, with frost, drought, disease, and insects cutting
yields by half.
At Camp Hanson, the Marine regiment’s station in Marjah, 200
tons of fertilizer and seed packs sit heaped beside the trucks that
just delivered them. One of the trucks has a shattered windshield,
and four of the men who drove the convoy here from Helmand’s
capital, Lashkar Gah, are now in the hospital, having been shot in
a Taliban ambush. The seeds—black mung beans, red radishes,
alfalfa, watermelon, corn—will be sold to a thousand farmers in the
area in the hope that they will quit growing poppies.
The commanding officer in Marjah is a tenaciously upbeat young
man named Brian Christmas who sounds like Santa Claus when he
rattles off the things he would love to see America do for
Afghanistan’s farmers. “There should be more seed programs
available to them next year, at low cost. There have to be
alternatives here. Like factories. Why not have a chicken coop, so
that they can sell their eggs here in Marjah? Instead of just
providing cotton, why not make Marjah yarn? A drug factory that
employs 30 guys—I’d like to compete with that and say to those
guys, ‘Let’s send you to a vocational tech school. Get you a small
business loan. Set you up in a mechanics shop. Or hey, how about
going into the police force? Pretty good salary, go home every
night—not a bad gig!’”
The next day, dozens of farmers show up to claim their latest
inducement. Simply setting foot on the Marine base is a risk that
many of the area’s farmers have decided not to take. The Taliban
have set up checkpoints and relieved passersby of their new
commodities. One boy is said to have been made to eat his
ISAF-issued registration card. A tribal elder
found to be assisting the Marines was “beaten to an amazing shade
of green,” according to a military interpreter. For most, the
Taliban are the devil they know—and, more to the point, the devil
who will likely still be here long after the ISAF troops are gone.
“These guys are playing both ends against the middle and seeing
who’s winning,” says John Hurrell of Rift Valley Agriculture, the
nongovernmental organization (NGO) coordinating the seed and
fertilizer distribution. “Whatever pays the best is what they’ll
grow. Personally, I think they’ll sell the fertilizer and seed and
go back to growing poppies.” One of the farmers I encounter filing
out of the Marine compound with a bag of seed is equivocal. “It
depends on what the local government does after the military
leaves,” he tells me. “If they leave us alone, then I’ll grow
poppy.”
Will the Afghan authorities continue to press for a poppy-free
future once the troops have left Helmand? “The minute poppy starts
to pop up, there’s got to be an immediate reaction—that’s all there
is to it,” says Lieutenant Colonel Christmas. “The Afghan
government has gotta be all over that—using local police. Things
will get 100 percent better if they have a police force made up of
their own people, ones they can trust.” Alas, Christmas could
recruit only ten locals to join the Marjah police—unsurprising,
considering that the Taliban have threatened and in some cases
killed civil servants in Helmand.
“We have two forms of money here: poppy, and American dollars,”
says a beardless 33-year-old Helmand farmer named Rehmatou as he
leaves the Marine base with his fertilizer. “This is our economy.
The Taliban aren’t pressuring me—that’s just a story you see on TV.
I grow for myself. I smuggle for myself. The Taliban are not the
reason. Poverty is the reason. And they’ll keep growing poppies
here—unless they’re forced not to. Force is the solution for
everything. As we say in Pashtu, ‘Power can flatten mountains.’
“Who will stop the smugglers—the police?” he asks with a laugh.
“It’s the police who transport our opium in their cars! You see the
big buildings in Lashkar Gah and Kandahar. This is money from
corruption.” Rehmatou betrays no love for the Taliban—”They’re
jackals”—but the system they have imposed works for him. Still, his
bemused cynicism fades when I ask, “Is a poppy economy really all
that bad for Afghanistan?”
“This is a bad way to make money,” Rehmatou says gravely. “It
trains you for no other occupation. When a father feeds a boy with
money from poppies, he will grow poppies too. He’ll have no other
skill. We have no carpenters, no engineers, no mechanics. We have
nothing.”
With a sad smile, the farmer says, “It is a kind of cancer on
our country.”
Is it possible for the cancer to be removed? Bordering Pakistan
to the east, Nangarhar Province has long been a drug smuggling
thoroughfare, and its mountainous reaches—which include the Khyber
Pass and the Tora Bora cave complex—are notoriously lawless. With
its Mediterranean climate, Nangarhar was Afghanistan’s biggest
opium producer as recently as 2004. Forced eradications began in
2005, but the government’s promises of alternative livelihoods were
not met initially, and even the provincial capital of Jalalabad
remained underdeveloped and quiet.
Today the city and its environs appear to be a post-poppy
success story. The fertile countryside, long regarded as
Afghanistan’s breadbasket, is alight with red cabbages and
tomatoes. Jalalabad’s streets are now among the most vibrant in
Afghanistan, and at its teeming wholesale market, hundreds of
trucks arrive every morning, bearing dozens of crops such as
watermelon, potatoes, squash, okra, and onions. None of these rival
the cash value of opium, and one potato farmer I meet at the market
tells me that he works an evening job as a security guard to make
ends meet. “But I don’t regret it—I’m glad not to be growing poppy
anymore,” he says.
In the village of Yaghi Band, which once grew poppies almost
exclusively, a group of tribal elders reflect on Nangarhar’s
post-poppy era in a room overlooking fields of cotton, rice,
broccoli, and other crops. “The life isn’t as good as it was five
years ago,” one of them says. “But it’s 60 percent of what we had.
And we’re hopeful of the new projects.” Among these projects is one
situated directly below us: a hydroelectrically powered textile
mill, set up by a USAID affiliate.
Contributions to the province from such programs seem endless.
Among those I visit are new irrigation dams and canals, new
bridges, a women’s weaving co-op, a potato chip factory, a honey
processing plant, a jam manufacturing facility, and the city’s
wholesale market, whose deputy director, Khwaja Mohammad, praises
the contributions of NGOs but then adds, “Afghanistan is still at
war. We can’t stand on our own two feet. If a country’s been at war
for 30 years, it may take 80 years to rebuild it. If the farmers
don’t continue to receive assistance, you can’t expect them not to
grow poppy.”
Eighty years of assistance? Is poppy-free Nangarhar a Potemkin
village propped up by aid from the West? What might it cost to
offer equivalent generosity to Badakhshan and Helmand, and would it
make a difference? When I put these questions to Nasrullah
Bakhtani, senior agriculturalist for Afghanistan’s Ministry of
Agriculture, he says, “Nangarhar has a tribal system. There’s one
big man in the village, and people accept what he says. The
governor there talked to these elders. He asked, ‘If we eradicate
poppies, what will you need?’ Proposals came from the people, and
the government said, ‘OK, we’ll provide those if you stop growing.’
As you see, Nangarhar has a lot of projects, people are happy, so
they stopped. Helmand and Badakhshan don’t have those kind of
tribal structures.”
Bakhtani once grew poppies himself. He stopped in 2002 when
Afghanistan’s new president, Hamid Karzai, declared that poppy
cultivation should cease. As an agriculture specialist, Bakhtani
was asked that year by the Karzai administration to help prepare a
road map for a post-poppy Afghanistan. That paper, “Scientific
Guidelines for Reduction of Poppy,” advocated the introduction of
alternative crops, expansion of irrigation systems, modernization
of animal husbandry techniques, rehabilitation of the northern
forests to diminish soil erosion, establishment of textile plants,
federal subsidies for seed and fertilizer—in short, the entire
laundry list now being implemented by the West.
But Bakhtani believes such programs must be community based, not
some carrot-and-stick-and-more-carrots approach by outsiders. To
circumnavigate the government’s pervasive corruption, Bakhtani has
in mind an elaborate set of checks and balances whereby a national
ministry contracts an organization to start a new project in a
particular community. The money for the project would be put in a
bank account, and both the community and the ministry would monitor
how the contractor spends it. Under this system, he envisions a
network of badly needed irrigation canals and drought-resistant
pistachio forests in Badakhshan. He imagines greenhouses in
Helmand, so that the province can produce off-season tomatoes and
other such crops that sell for high prices. This is the future as
Nasrullah Bakhtani imagines it, brighter than a poppy field.
But, I gently ask: as long as the local governments are filled
with corrupt officials bribed by those with a stake in Afghanistan
remaining an opium haven, does his proposal stand a chance?
“The problem,” he says, “is that the government is
involved.”
“And so to eradicate poppy, we would first have to eradicate
corruption?” I ask.
“Yes. Yes.”
“And so realistically, is there a chance the poppy can be
eliminated as a major part of Afghanistan’s economy?”
Bakhtani looks thoughtful for a moment. “No,” he then says. “Not
possible.”
Grinning, he says, “Sometimes I think I should form my own
company, get money from the government, go out into the field and
do all of this myself. Go out and show people the way.”
Then, with a weary shrug: “But people would just say I’m
corrupt.”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/02…
