On the Poppy Trail

The road from Kabul to Jalalabad is perfectly safe today,” my colleague Najibullah told me. “It hasn’t been bombed for four days.” Driving in a beat-up old Toyota, Najib, the driver, and I were all wearing traditional Afghan baggy pants and long shirts. We hoped to slip through government checkpoints as well as confuse any lurking insurgents. It worked.

We drove through a deep valley surrounded on both sides by high, rugged mountains. The pass reminded me why conquering Afghanistan has never been easy. A few people atop the cliffs armed with nothing more than rocks to start an avalanche could hold off a conquering ground army for weeks.

Conquering the opium/heroin trade in Afghanistan has proven to be just as difficult. For eight years, Republican and Democratic administrations have said the Taliban controls narcotic trafficking in Afghanistan. In fact, according to both the CIA and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the insurgents control about 2-3 percent of the total. I was traveling through Afghanistan in mufti to find out who really rules the world’s largest supply of heroin.

In Jalalabad, a series of dirt roads led us to farmer Ebdullah Ebad. The craggy-faced farmer had wrapped a traditional scarf on his head to protect against the burning sun. Ebad and his family once grew opium poppy here. Today, they have planted vegetables and an apricot orchard as part of a U.S.-sponsored crop substitution program.

In the 1990s, Ebad tells me, poppy was a profitable cash crop. From 2000 to 2001, under international pressure, the Taliban stopped poppy growing. But the trade sprang back within weeks after the U.S. invasion in October 2001.

It was simple free market economics. The West had a demand for heroin. Afghanistan had hardworking farmers and entrepreneurial drug traffickers who could match supply with demand. Once the U.S. invaded, there were no more of those pesky government regulations to bother the narco-capitalists.

The U.S.-allied Northern Alliance, the mujahedeen who had continued to fight the Taliban in the 1990s, supported themselves through heroin production and distribution. After the U.S. invasion, they simply moved their headquarters to Kabul as part of the newly installed Hamid Karzai government. Poppy was back in bloom, and Afghanistan quickly became the world’s number one heroin supplier.

Those were boom times for the Ebad family. Starting in 2004, they grew poppy. Raw opium was fetching $220/kilo. “It made economic sense,” Ebad says. “With that money, we solved all of our problems.”

Local drug traffickers loaned him money to plant the crop. The traffickers shipped the opium to primitive labs where it was turned into heroin for eventual shipment to nearby Pakistan. Each step of the process was protected by local police and political officials. They, in turn, were protected by networks of traffickers reaching all the way to the Karzai cabinet. The mainstream media largely ignored the role of government officials, however, instead spreading the myth that the Taliban controlled most of the drug trade.

That coverage began to shift in the past year as Karzai has become more unpopular in Washington. U.S. officials leaked stories linking Karzai officials to the drug trade. The New York Times reported, for example, that former Defense Minister Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who is Karzai’s vice presidential candidate, shipped his heroin to Russia in a government cargo plane, which then returned stuffed with cash. The Times also wrote that Ahmed Wali Karzai, half-brother of the president, has taken control of the heroin trade in Kandahar.

Mohammad Zafar, Afghanistan’s deputy anti-narcotics minister, told me those charges are untrue. “If any person is involved, even the brother of the president, he will be captured by the government,” he informs me in an interview in Kabul. “We don’t have any evidence in this regard.”

But the U.N. drug office has a decidedly different viewpoint. I visited the agency’s heavily fortified compound in Kabul. Workers were putting the finishing touches on a new blast wall inside the existing eight-foot-high blast wall. One can’t be too careful in Kabul these days.

Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the Afghanistan office, came out to greet me with a wide smile and firm handshake. We spent some time at his computer crunching numbers. According to his figures, the insurgents directly control only about $125 million of the country’s $4.4 billion heroin trade. The CIA puts the Taliban control at $75 million.

So, Lemahieu noted, about 97 percent of the drug trade in Afghanistan is controlled by traffickers other than the insurgents.

“There are people in this government who are the big architects,” he tells me. “That’s what’s dangerous.”

The Taliban do tax poppy farmers and extort protection money from smugglers passing through their territory. But they don’t control the national smuggling rings. Criminal gangs and pro-U.S. warlords control that part of the business and happily collude with the insurgents on buying, selling, and shipping heroin.

“The parliament issues statements that the international community wants to hear,” says Lemahieu. “And then at night they are negotiating trade agreements with people who are considered their enemy.”

The pro-U.S. warlords use drug money to finance their militias, grease their patronage machines, and bribe government officials, according to Afzal Rashid, a former senior adviser to the Afghan Ministry of Finance who now lives in California.

“The whole Ministry of Interior was corrupt in its relations with the drug dealers,” he says.

Rashid says the United States and Karzai ignore the high-level drug traffickers because their support is needed for the U.S. war effort.

“I’m sure the U.S. Army looked the other way,” says Rashid. “Maybe the warlords were helping identify Al Qaeda.”

The United States and other occupying powers say they no longer emphasize poppy eradication, which unfairly targets small farmers, but instead focus on arresting drug traffickers.

Afghanistan, which continues to supply 90 percent of the world’s opium, has had some limited success with a combination of legal crackdowns and crop substitution. According to the U.N. survey issued in September, opium production has dropped by 22 percent over the past year.

Lemahieu said the number one reason for the decrease is the low price of opium. Raw opium fetches about $50/kilo, making the cultivation of wheat, vegetables, and fruit relatively more profitable. He notes that if the price of opium rises, then heroin production will increase. That’s the capitalist market.

For farmer Ebad, abandoning poppy cultivation was a straight-up economic decision. Squatting in his field where the poppies used to grow, he told me when the price of raw opium dropped, he welcomed U.S. efforts to help his family grow other crops.

Ebad wanted the USAID program to continue because he got free seedlings, fertilizer, and advice on growing new crops. But that program has already ended. Without subsidies, he feared he wouldn’t be able to make enough profit. And, he said with a chuckle, if his new crops aren’t profitable enough, “I’ll return to planting poppy.”

If that happens, there will be plenty of U.S. allies ready to buy, process, and ship his crop to eager international markets.

Freelance journalist Reese Erlich has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for twenty-three years. He won a Peabody Award (shared with others) and was honored by Project Censored for his Middle East coverage. His fourth book, “Conversations with Terrorists,” will be published in 2010.