According to a joint UN-Afghan
government survey, Kandahar is one of five provinces where
opium cultivation has risen since the new year, despite
plummeting production in the rest of the country RIVERS
flooding, US soldiers at the border and corrupt militias
losing their jobs and weapons - life as a drug smuggler
in southern Afghanistan isn’t what it used to be
for Ahmed Jan.
Getting convoys of 60 or 70 off-road vehicles, each filled
with a ton of dry opium resin, through a day’s drive
from southern Kandahar city to the border with Iran has
become complicated in recent months, he tells.
“It is much more difficult to get stuff out of the
country so it’s only a few secret routes that are
running, like rivers of drugs,” says Jan, a rotund
man in his 40s using a pseudonym.
His problems are an indication
that Afghanistan’s fight against narcotics is paying
off. President Hamid Karzai came to office last year pledging
to wage a ‘jihad’ or holy war on drugs, backed
by the US and other western governments.
With between 40 to 60 percent of Afghanistan’s economy
generated by opium in 2005, both the US and the UN have
warned that the country is tottering on the brink of becoming
a “narco-state”.
After three years of focusing on battling the Taliban
as the Afghan opium industry spiralled, the US has pledged
780 million to battle narcotics in the country over the
next year, and tightened security along the border.
Border checkpoints in Afghanistan, previously staffed
by militia commanders in the pockets of the smuggling
mafia, are now manned by US forces and American-trained
soldiers from the fledgling Afghan army.
Opium prices have dropped sharply because traffickers
can’t move their vast stocks out of Afghanistan.
Last year, dry opium resin was selling for 142 dollars
per kilo at the farm gate at harvest, according to UN
figures.
Now it sells for around 100 dollars, according to Attatullah,
an opium grower in Zhare district, about 30 minutes’
drive outside Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban
movement. “The American soldiers are blocking the
routes,” 36-year-old Attatullah tells AFP, standing
knee-deep in a field of poppies, which are beginning to
burst into flower.
Afghanistan’s extreme weather has also helped stem
the drug trade. After seven years of drought, the landlocked
nation has finally seen rain and many smuggling routes
which crossed dry riverbeds en route to Pakistan and Iran
are now blocked by flowing water.
A third factor has been the disarmament of militias, which
after fighting the Soviets and then joining the US against
the Taliban have now been removed from their posts as
part of a UN-backed drive. “People who were disarmed
had a very good business running checkpoints so now they
will be compelled to find other forms of income like drug-running,”
Jan says.
“Because of disarmament it’s much harder to
get enough guns for our convoys.”
The convoys are always heavily armed. Each of the 60 or
so 4x4s travels with five to 10 people who are paid between
1,600 and 2,200 dollars each for the risk involved.
As a lower-ranking smuggler, Jan equips four or five vehicles
to travel with the larger convoy while the bigger operators
provide up to 10 vehicles each.
“There is over a ton of opium in each Land Cruiser,
and we expect them to defend the cargo with their lives,”
said Jan. But for all the inconveniences now facing smugglers
and the corrupt officials who help them, it is farmers
used to planting nothing but opium who stand to lose out
most from the crackdown. An internationally backed eradication
team arrives in Kandahar province in mid-April to tackle
the poppy fields.
According to a joint UN-Afghan government survey Kandahar
is one of five provinces where opium cultivation has risen
since the new year, despite plummeting production in the
rest of the country.
New police chief Lieutenant General Mohammed Ayoub Salangi,
installed by Karzai last month to stem the province’s
drugs trade and growing lawlessness, said an eradication
strategy was being worked out. “We will have a meeting
with government officials, the army and the eradication
force to decide whether and how much to eradicate,”
he told AFP.
However the farmers will lose a year’s income if
their crops are wiped out, while a government strategy
to provide them with alternative livelihoods is only in
its infancy.
Smuggler Jan warned that widespread eradication could
fuel support for the Taliban insurgency in the south.
“People can’t rise up themselves if their
fields are destroyed but they can lend support to the
Taliban who are all still living in the suburbs of Kandahar,”
he said.
Afghan drug barons not an easy prey
The fact that Afghanistan’s police had no role in
the recent capture of drug baron Bashir Noorzai in the
United States highlights how far the world’s largest
opium producer still has to go in its fight against narcotics,
experts say.
Noorzai was arrested in the United States and charged
with conspiring to import more than 50 million dollars’
worth of heroin into the United States and other countries.
The indictment said Noorzai was closely linked to the
Taliban regime that US forces helped depose in late 2001
for sheltering members of the Al-Qaeda network behind
the September 11 attacks just a few weeks earlier.
Noorzai’s network provided explosives, weaponry
and manpower to the Taliban in exchange for the protection
of its opium crops and heroin infrastructure and drug
smuggling routes, it said.
But Afghan authorities admit it would have been difficult
for them to lay a hand on a popular figure like Noorzai
inside the country because of a lack of evidence. “He
was a very popular drug trafficker but due to a lack of
concrete evidence against him, Afghan police could not
arrest him,” Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah
Mashal told AFP.
“Afghan police had no role in his arrest.”
Noorzai was extremely well-connected in the southern city
of Kandahar, which was the spiritual heartland of the
Taliban, officials said. “He has been a member of
the Kandahar Provincial Council (of elders and influential
people) over the past two-and-a-half years,” Mashal
said. Noorzai, who was identified by President George
W. Bush last June as one of the world’s most wanted
drug traffickers, was seized after arriving in the United
States by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials.
With Afghanistan’s criminal justice system still
at an embryonic stage and many government officials allegedly
involved in the country’s narcotics trade, which
accounts for between 40 to 60 percent of the economy,
Noorzai would not have been likely to come to trial here,
western officials said.
