After 9/11, growing opium was a matter of prudent judgment for farmers. Jalaluddin Khan, a farmer in Helmand province, cultivated poppy so he could feed his extended family of thirty, including four brothers and their families. In 2003 he planted poppies on his eighteen-acre farm— something he had done six times in the past ten years to make ends meet. Before winter set in, Khan would meticulously hoe his soil to uproot weeds, sprinkle fertilizer, and repair irrigation channels before sowing poppy seeds saved from the previous year’s crop. A few weeks later thin shoots appeared and grew into cabbagelike plants, which soon sprouted bright red flowers. The flowers bloomed like a sea of red until their petals fell away to reveal a hardened capsule, which was lanced with thin homemade blades. Khan squeezed each capsule with his fingers until a milky white viscous substance oozed out. The liquid solidified into a brown gum, which was scraped off with a trowel. This operation would be repeated every few days until the plant stopped yielding gum. The crop had taken just four months to mature and needed no excessive water or care.
The raw opium would be slapped into a cake and kept wet in plastic bags until the local drug dealer arrived. It would then be sent to makeshift laboratories in the mountains where, with the help of a few readily available precursor chemicals, the dark brown paste would be turned into a fine white powder—heroin. Ten kilograms of opium paste produces one kilogram of heroin. For Khan it was the cheapest and fastest cash crop to grow, giving a good return, and could be stored for several years if prices dropped. The crop provided a support system for farmers that the state could not match. Since the early 1990s, farmers could mortgage their crop to dealers for a cash loan while dealers provided protection, agricultural extension services, technical assistance in the shape of better seeds, and even the skilled labor needed when harvesting began. To eradicate opium, the state would have to improve agricultural services. “We know that planting poppy is bad, but our country is destroyed and we have received little assistance, so we have no real alternative to poppy,” said Khan. More than two million Afghan farmers like Khan were growing poppy as their primary cash crop by 2005.
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Three decades of war had led to Afghanistan’s dubious status as the world’s heroin provider. By the late 1980s, as the CIA-sponsored Afghan Mujahedin bled the Soviet occupation forces, the region comprising Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan earned the title of the Golden Crescent, replacing the Golden Triangle of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand as the lead producer of opium. Extensive opium production had first begun in Pakistan, which in 1986 produced more than eight hundred tons of opium a year, or 70 percent of the world’s heroin supply. Afghan commanders transplanted the crop into southern Afghanistan, and opium paste was then carried back into Pakistan and used by the Mujahedin to fund the war, while the CIA-ISI turned a blind eye. Several high-ranking Pakistani army, air force, and ISI officials were caught trafficking heroin—in 1983 the entire ISI staff in Quetta had to be removed for dealing in opium. As I describe in my earlier book, the ISI used money from the drug trade to fund some of its covert operations.
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The CIA played a dubious role just as it had done earlier in Vietnam, condemning the trade but allowing it to flourish. In the 1980s the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) identified forty major heroin syndicates, including some headed by Pakistani government officials, yet not a single one was broken up, as the CIA wanted no embarrassing links among the “heroic” Mujahedin leaders, Pakistani officials, and drug traffickers. At least one DEA official resigned in protest and others left Pakistan in despair at the CIA’s refusal to deal with the problem.
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After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States poured more than $100 million into Pakistan to eradicate poppy cultivation there. Production dropped to twenty-four tons of opium in 1997 and again to a mere two tons in 1999. Pakistan became virtually drug-free, as opium production shifted back to Afghanistan, now under the Taliban regime.
Opium fueled the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, when the warlords used drug money to pay soldiers’ salaries and buy weapons and food, as the war had destroyed food production. Only 12 percent of Afghanistan’s land was arable, but that was reduced a further 40 percent during the civil war. Once self-sufficient in food production, Afghanistan was now dependent on imported wheat from Pakistan, paid for in money earned from opium. As the Taliban expanded north and west so did their control over the illicit opium trade, and production rose from 1,570 tons in 1990 to 2,800 tons in 1997.
In the 1990s the Taliban collected
usher
from farmers, an Islamic agricultural tax ranging from 10 to 20 percent of production, and also charged traffickers a
zakat
tax on their shipments of heroin. Traditionally a charitable Islamic tax distributed to the poor,
zakat
should be no more than 2.5 percent of an individual’s disposable income. Ironically, by taxing both opium production and trafficking, the Taliban became the first Afghan government to tax agriculture, which no previous regime had had the capacity to do. The Taliban expanded export routes, funneling drugs through Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, and the Arabian Gulf. By 1998 the Taliban and drug traffickers were flying heroin out of Kandahar to the ports of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah—using al Qaeda contacts to sell drugs directly to the Gulf mafia and earn greater profits.
The Taliban were repeatedly told by the United States and the UN that if they banned poppy cultivation, it would win them international sympathy and perhaps even political recognition. After three consecutive bumper crops, the Taliban suddenly banned poppy cultivation in 2001. Harshly imposed on farmers, the ban was highly effective—opium production that year slumped to just 185 tons—and was termed “the most effective drug control action of modern times.”
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However, the Taliban did not prohibit trafficking in existing stocks, and it later became clear that the ban had been the result of overproduction and a slump in opium prices, which had collapsed from $600 to just $30 a kilogram. The ban promptly pushed the price up to $650 a kilogram. Nevertheless it had devastated many farmers, who were left with large unpaid loans to drug dealers and no source of income. The ban led to anger against the Taliban on the eve of 9/11 and increased opposition to the regime. The collapse of the Taliban regime coincided with the poppy planting season, and farmers immediately planted poppy to pay off their debts.
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Before the war, drug dealers had disposed of their stocks fearing that the United States would target them. “Dealers are preparing for the worst by selling their stocks, but they are also expecting farmers to grow poppy once the war is over,” said Bernard Frahi, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime regional chief in Islamabad.
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As a result of the great sell-off, the price of opium plummeted to $150 a kilogram. The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA allies. The United States told its British allies that the war on terrorism had nothing to do with counter-narcotics. Instead, drug lords were fêted by the CIA and asked if they had any information about Osama bin Laden. Thus, the United States sent the first and clearest message to the drug lords: that they would not be targeted.
Britain became the lead nation in developing a counter-narcotics strategy. It had a vested interest because 98 percent of heroin sold on London’s streets came from Afghanistan. Its intelligence service MI6 suggested buying the entire 2002 opium harvest from farmers. The Foreign Office objected and the plan was dropped in favor of compensating farmers for destroying their crop—a plan that was disastrous when implemented. Farmers were paid cash for eradicating their crop at the rate of $1,250 to $1,500 per hectare. MI6 and British commandos handed over cash to governors and police chiefs in the provinces to pay off the farmers.
The program, which cost more than $80 million, was mired in massive corruption, as Afghan officials distributed the money to their tribes or clans, who took the cash but failed to eradicate the crop. Other farmers used the money to increase cultivation, while thousands of others who did eradicate their crop received nothing. A huge piece of the money ended up in the war chests of the warlords. The opium harvest for 2002 had leaped to 3,400 tons, from 185 tons the previous year. Farmers earned an estimated $13,000 from a hectare of land under poppy versus $400 from a hectare under wheat.
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The center of the country’s drug trade was Helmand, a province the size of Wales, with a population of one million. Helmand had once been the epitome of progress. The Helmand River flowed through the province, and in the 1960s Morrison-Knudsen, the company that built the Hoover Dam in the United States, was hired by USAID to build a dam and 300 miles of irrigation canals that would irrigate the Helmand Valley. The project was highly successful, creating 250,000 acres of arable land out of the desert, which quickly became the fruit and bread basket for Afghanistan and led to the training of an entire generation of Afghan engineers and agricultural extension workers. Hundreds of American families lived in Lashkargah, the capital, and a former American community center still boasts the remains of a dance floor, cinema, bar, and library. Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1960 that the Americans were creating “an America-in-Asia.”
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The irrigation system collapsed after the Soviet invasion, but the land was arable and farmers turned to cultivating poppy, encouraged by the Akhunzadas, a powerful family who headed the Alizai tribe that dominated the province. The Akhunzadas fought the Soviets and traded in opium. In the autumn of 2003, when I visited Lashkargah, there were no paved roads, electricity, or running water. Dust storms swept through the bare landscape, caking everything in a fine white powder. The American-built paved roads with street lighting were now sandy tracks. Amanullah, the chief of police, told me that his men had not received their salaries for a year, while teachers at a local girls’ college had not been paid for six months. Kabul and the international community seemed to have abandoned Helmand province.
Yet at a massive car mall in the middle of this dust bowl town at least eight thousand brand-new vehicles were parked bumper to bumper, where buyers could pick up the latest four-wheel-drive Toyotas or Mercedeses. The customers were bearded Pashtun drug dealers and farmers, some of whom owned a dozen vehicles and dropped wads of cash to buy new ones. Helmand was the country’s center for opium, and its traffickers began to spread their expertise and skills to other parts of the country, enticing farmers to grow poppy so they could buy their crops, too.
Farmers from northern Afghanistan visited Helmand to buy poppy seeds and hire skilled laborers. Ali Ahmad Jalali, the minister of the interior, told me he was tracking drug dealers from Pakistan and Helmand who were renting large tracts of land in northern provinces and setting up old-style plantations to grow poppy. According to British officials, the governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada—who had accompanied Karzai into Afghanistan on a motorbike in 2001 and remained a close friend of the president—was generally believed to profit from drug involvement. He was accused of favoring his cronies with prime real estate parcels and commanded hundreds of well-paid gunmen, while the police force was undermanned and unpaid and mullahs, aid workers, teachers, and women activists who opposed poppy cultivation were being gunned down. Most Western NGOs had fled by 2003, fearing Akhunzada’s gunmen or the Taliban.
Akhunzada strongly denied the accusations of corruption and involvement in drug trafficking and blamed the West for the lack of aid. “In the past two years no significant reconstruction has been done in Helmand, even though it is most strategic for the country’s stability,” he told me. “When the Taliban are paying their fighters thousands of dollars, I just have promises to offer people rather than aid projects.”
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Amazingly, the only U.S. military presence in Helmand comprised just the 120 U.S. SOF who made up a provincial reconstruction team. Their officers felt abandoned and they had only minuscule funds for reconstruction projects.
In 2004, USAID hired Chemonics International, a consulting firm from Washington, to implement a $130 million project to revitalize agriculture in Helmand, but the project could not be implemented because there were no U.S. troops to guard the technicians. The following year a canal-cleaning project funded by USAID, which provided employment to thousands of Afghans, was stopped after the Taliban killed five workers. Britain and the United States had committed $119 million for alternative livelihoods for farmers, but in 2005 the program had spent only $4 million—all of that for salaries. There was no coordination among the Western allies or among the Afghan government, the U.S. military, aid agencies, and the UN. Nobody, it seemed, was prepared to take the burgeoning crisis in Helmand seriously.
Some foreigners continued to stick it out in Helmand. Steve Shaulis, a stocky American from Maryland, had established a for-profit aid agency in Helmand to help farmers grow cash crops and fruit. “We can’t stop farmers growing poppy, we can only take their arguments for growing poppy away one by one by offering real alternatives,” Shaulis said.
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He encouraged farmers to grow cotton, which was processed in local ginning factories, but it was a drop in the ocean in a sea of poppy. Sarah Chayes, a former American journalist with National Public Radio, settled in Kandahar and helped the Karzai family set up an NGO. Later she left them to work on income-generating schemes among Kandahar’s women. Hardly any other foreign NGOs were prepared to work in the south.
The drug epidemic led to high volumes of crime and inter-clan feuds, further undermining security and giving the Taliban the opportunity to adjudicate between tribes. Corruption was rampant within the local administration. “Eighty percent of the crimes are being committed by local militias, commanders, and the police rather than criminals, so the Taliban are not to blame for everything,” Yousuf Pashtun, the governor of Kandahar province, told me. “It’s a vicious circle—if there is no peace there can be no reconstruction and if there is no reconstruction then peace is impossible to attain.”
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