Helmand soon became the major conduit for opium sales from other provinces, even the far northern provinces of Mazar and Badakhshan. The UN estimated that the entire opium crop from the provinces of Ghor, Bamiyan, and Uruzgan traveled through Helmand to be sold in Pakistan and Iran.
13
Opium arrived from as far north as Badakhshan province. Heavily armed convoys of four-wheeled vehicles crossed the desert to reach Zaranj, in Nimroz province, which shared a three-hundred-mile deserted border with Pakistan and Iran. Up to twenty pickups or Toyota Land Cruisers armed with missiles and rockets that could bring down helicopter gunships would travel at 150 miles per hour across the sands. It was the favorite route for the traffickers, and there were no U.S. satellites monitoring them or U.S. SOF patrols to stop them.
The barely existent justice system compounded the problem. Honest police officers could not gather evidence against drug dealers because they did not have the training or technology to do so. Security forces had neither the training, arms, nor vehicles to catch them, while judges could not prosecute traffickers because the courts did not know the procedures. At least in Kabul attempts were made to create an antidrug infrastructure. With the support of UNODC, a Counter Narcotics Directorate (CND) was set up in 2003 to coordinate the fight against drugs. That year Britain helped establish the Counter-Narcotics Police Force within the Interior Ministry. In December 2004, UNODC set up the counter-narcotics Criminal Justice Task Force, consisting of thirty-five investigators, fifteen judges, and thirty-five prosecutors who were to receive special training, while British commandos trained an elite Afghan counter-narcotics force. Yet the impact on the ground remained minimal.
Ashraf Ghani, the finance minister, was one of the first to warn the world of the danger of Afghanistan developing into a “narco-state,” and he urged Western donors to fund alternative jobs, crops, and livelihoods for the farmers. “Poppy farmers will accept the loss of their crops, their land, and their livelihoods only if they believe in an alternative future,” Ghani said. The World Bank made equally dire predictions. “The linkages between drugs, warlords, and insecurity add up to a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing problems. . . . Afghanistan’s opium economy presents a grave danger to the country’s entire state-building and reconstruction agenda,” said a World Bank report.
14
There was no consensus or strategy within the international community on what to do. Initially the United States even refused to acknowledge that drugs were a problem. Rumsfeld and the military ignored the issue, claiming that it was an unimportant social issue unconnected to fighting terrorism. When Rumsfeld was pointedly asked in 2003 what the United States was doing about drugs in Helmand, he put the questioner down, saying, “You ask what we’re going to do and the answer is, I don’t really know.”
15
Rumsfeld refused Colin Powell’s request that U.S. forces at least interdict the convoys of the drug traffickers. The Pentagon said it would not authorize interdiction in case it led to “mission creep,” where the army ran the risk of getting involved in more missions than its limited numbers of troops could handle, as well as possibly antagonizing local warlords who might also be involved in drug trafficking. A frustrated U.S. SOF colonel in charge of the PRT in Helmand told me how he watched convoys of opium traveling past his camp every morning but did not have orders to stop them. His rules of engagement stated that if he discovered drug shipments he
could
destroy them, but there was no order saying he
must
destroy them or that he
must
interdict drug convoys.
16
The huge amount of poppies planted in 2003 provided a massive harvest in 2004. Even though drought and disease ravaged some of the crop, 4,200 tons of opium were harvested compared with 3,600 in the previous year. Farmland under poppy cultivation increased by 64 percent, and for the first time poppy was cultivated in all thirty-four provinces. UNODC estimated that 2.3 million Afghans, or 14 percent of the rural population, were now involved in cultivation. Farm laborers earned ten dollars a day collecting opium resin—five times the average daily wage. The opium economy was now worth $2.8 billion, equal to 60 percent of the country’s legal economy, which was calculated at $4.5 billion.
17
Over 80 percent of Afghan opium was now refined into heroin inside the country, rather than being exported as raw opium paste.
The 2004 harvest embarrassed Washington and London sufficiently for them to begin a more serious debate as to what to do. The United States wanted aerial spraying to eradicate the crop as it was already doing in Colombia. Britain and the Afghan government were adamantly opposed, fearing it would damage other crops and livestock and drive angry farmers into the hands of the Taliban. They proposed ground eradication, which was slow and cumbersome but more discriminatory. Robert Charles, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL, insisted that spraying was the only answer. Charles upped the ante in Washington when he demanded that U.S. forces get involved in both interdiction and eradication, but Rumsfeld refused. “We could have destroyed all the [heroin] labs and warehouses in the three primary provinces—Helmand, Nangarhar, and Kandahar—in a week,” Charles said later.
Robert Charles rightly predicted that failure in 2004 would worsen the insurgency and force the United States to send in more troops. He was the first senior U.S. official to admit publicly that drug profits were funding the Taliban. However, in January 2005, with the new secretary of state Condoleezza Rice offering no support and Karzai and Tony Blair opposed to his views, Charles resigned. The internal debate in Washington was irreparably weakened but continued for more than a year. The United States committed larger sums to counter narcotics, but there was no agreement on how to spend the money. Out of $780 million allocated by Washington in 2004, only $120 million was for alternative livelihoods—the most important ingredient in weaning farmers away from poppy cultivation.
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The opium crop was grown in only about 3 percent of the total arable land, so clearly farmers were growing other crops, and there was enormous potential for their improving yields and the incomes from them if aid was directed there. However, developing alternative crops and livelihoods was never a serious part of U.S. policy, and the debate circled around aerial or ground eradication.
Some ground eradication did start but only made matters worse. Among the Pashtun tribes, any kind of eradication was considered unfair because the poor farmer would be hit first while the rich ones could bribe their way out of trouble. Ground eradication was used by powerful tribes and officials to weaken their rivals. Those tribes out of power were targeted first, and sought further protection from the Taliban. The danger with aerial eradication was that it would unite
all
the tribes against the government. Traffickers actually welcomed limited eradication because it would raise the price of opium, which had fallen from six hundred dollars to ninety dollars per kilo after three massive harvests. The United States refused to recognize that the problem was not drugs per se but drug money, which undermined state institutions, encouraged corruption, and helped fund the Taliban and al Qaeda. Farmers received only about 20 percent of the revenue from drugs, while traffickers received 80 percent. The export value of the opium crop rose from just under $1.0 billion in 2000 to $2.5 billion in 2002 and $3.1 billion in 2006.
19
Only by targeting the major traffickers could drug money be stopped from reaching the extremists.
Karzai and the Kabul government shared the blame for failing to tackle the major traffickers. The UN and all the major Western embassies gathered evidence that Karzai was tolerating suspected drug traffickers because they were either his political allies or close friends or because he could not afford their removal from power. There was enormous pressure on Karzai to remove Akhunzada as governor of Helmand, but Karzai refused to do so. Finally, in late 2005, just before British troops were due to be deployed in Helmand, Tony Blair gave Karzai an ultimatum: Britain would not deploy troops as long as Akhunzada remained in his post. Karzai succumbed but gave Akhunzada a seat in the Senate while keeping on his younger brother as deputy governor—a move that undermined the British deployment. In 2006, during the Taliban offensive, Karzai turned to Akhunzada again, putting him in charge of an auxiliary police force in the province, despite strong British objections.
Another close friend of the Karzai family was Arif Nurzai, the minister for tribal affairs, whose sister was married to Karzai’s younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. Western embassies accused Nurzai of protecting traffickers, which he vehemently denied. Western pressure forced Karzai to remove him from the cabinet, but he was then elected to parliament and became deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament.
New York Times
correspondent Carlotta Gall named several staunch Karzai allies, including Akhunzada and Nurzai, as widely believed to profit from the drug trade, and she quoted unnamed diplomatic sources as saying “there are even reports” that Ahmed Wali Karzai was also linked to the drug trade.
20
Wali Karzai denied the charges, but the president was furious and ordered an investigation into Gall’s sources, which turned out to be a senior British diplomat whom the Afghan government briefly declared persona non grata.
21
Reports about Wali Karzai intensified in June 2006 after the American television network ABC quoted U.S. Army files purloined from the Bagram base describing how Wali Karzai had received money from drug lords. “They want to give my brother a bad name,” Wali Karzai retorted.
22
The U.S. military said the report was outdated but did not reject its authority. Wali Karzai lived in Kandahar, where he represented his brother in managing the southern Pashtun tribes. He was criticized by many Pashtuns for allegedly favoring his own tribe and other tribes loyal to the Karzai family, while pushing away tribes who were not natural allies, forcing them to join the Taliban. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, Wali Karzai was elected head of the Kandahar provincial council, further enhancing his power in the south. Many of the former NA warlords—ministers and generals in the north—were also involved in drug trafficking.
The Interior Ministry did not just fail to take down the warlords; it became a major protector of drug traffickers, and Karzai refused to clean it out. As warlord militias were demobilized and disarmed by the UN, commanders found new positions in the Interior Ministry and continued to provide protection to drug traffickers. Positions such as police chief in poppy-producing districts were auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the going rate reported to be one hundred thousand dollars for a six-month appointment to a position with a salary of just sixty dollars a month. The massive corruption within the police that was ignored by Germany, which was supposed to be training the force, was a major cause for public dissatisfaction and gave the Taliban further reason to mobilize public support. In 2004 the fragmented production of opium by thousands of dealers was consolidated under a smaller number of large dealers. By 2007, UNODC estimated that there were just twenty-five to thirty senior traffickers, each one running two hundred or more junior drug dealers, who in turn ran some five hundred local purchasers. Over 70 percent of the major traffickers were based in the south but none had been jailed.
23
Tribal loyalties, politics, and links to the Taliban or the government were closely mixed up and it was impossible to unravel one thread without unraveling the entire ball of string. There was also a blurring of lines by powerful figures who trafficked in drugs and those who protected traffickers. The determining factor was Karzai’s weakness and unwillingness to target major drug traffickers. I tackled him about this regularly, but he vehemently denied that anybody in his administration was involved in drugs, and if asked about particular individuals, he said they were needed for the time being or that there was no concrete evidence against them— which was often true. He repeated these arguments to Western donors, who found it more difficult to justify troops and aid to Afghanistan when the president was appointing drug dealers to top political posts. It was clear that improving the justice system, training police, or eradicating crops was meaningless unless the top traffickers were caught.
In 2005, after several U.S. congressmen shamed the Pentagon for its inaction, the Pentagon and the CIA finally came around to publicly accepting that drug money was fueling terrorism. The United States, Britain, and the G8 group of nations approved a major counter-narcotics plan at a summit meeting in London in June 2005. Rumsfeld reluctantly agreed to provide airlift and planning for five Afghan commando teams trained by U.S. and British Special Forces. However, he continued to drag his feet when it came to implementation. The Pentagon promised to embed DEA officials with U.S. troops and provide them helicopters to raid heroin labs, but the DEA officials in Afghanistan were ignored by the U.S. military. Under pressure, Rumsfeld had accepted that there was a problem but then made sure that the U.S. military was not involved in doing anything to solve it.
The arrival of NATO forces in the south in 2006 made little difference. No NATO country mandated its troops to interdict drug convoys or catch traffickers. Despite the G8 plan, no practical help was offered by any country. “Afghanistan is teetering on becoming a narco-state,” admitted Gen. James Jones, the overall commander of NATO in Europe in May 2006. But in the same breath he added, “You will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields. This is not our mandate.”
24
Only Antonio Costa, head of the UNODC, had the courage to call a spade a spade. “Unfortunately Afghanistan is addicted to its own opium,” said Costa. “Members of the local administration, police officials . . . and even politicians and members of parliament benefit from the trafficking.”
25