What's America's Real Role in the Afghan Heroin Trade?

By Reese Erlich, AlterNet. Posted May 1, 2002.

Obeidullah Shanawaz’ farm is a mini-monument to recent Afghan history. The wealthy farmer took me on a walking tour of seemingly barren fields that will soon be sprouting winter wheat and vegetables.

"Over here," he says, "are stables once owned by the king." That would be stables built around 1900. "Over here," he says somewhat more grimly, pointing to a splintered frame, "is where the warlords fired rockets at my front door."

Shanawaz’ farm, on the outskirts of Kabul, was in firing range of warlords battling for control of the city in the early 1990s. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and the government they left behind fell in 1992, warlords who now belong to the Northern Alliance began a bitter civil war that caused more destruction to the cities than ever occurred during the Soviet occupation.

Shanawaz opposed the Taliban, which took over in 1996, and welcomed their recent downfall. But the new U.S.-backed regime hasn’t exactly inspired his confidence. He walks over to the spot in front of his house where his Land Rover was parked before a local Northern Alliance commander stole it. He says he has spent the last month trying to get it back, to no avail, even though he has the name of the commander who commandeered the car. So far, no policeman or government official in Kabul will do anything about it.

Shanawaz says Afghanistan has no effective central government, police, or army. Local warlords rule as they did in the 1990s. And that’s why opium poppies are back in bloom.

Farmers have grown poppies for centuries in Afghanistan. The northern climate is perfectly suited for poppy production, Afghan farmers note with a hint of local pride. Drug dealers in Mexico and Colombia grow poppies but produce inferior quality, the Afghans say. Poppy growing flourishes in Afghanistan because it’s cheap to raise and fabulously profitable to sell.

By the late 1990s Afghanistan supplied 75 percent of the world’s heroin. The low-maintenance crop had become a major foreign-exchange earner for the country. The Taliban caved in to tremendous international pressure and prohibited the crop in 1999. Within two years, the poppy crop had been reduced by 95 percent, according to an assessment by the U.N. office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCP). In May 2001, the Bush Administration even promised the Taliban $43 million in aid as a reward for their anti-drug efforts.

When the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan last October, the Taliban crumbled, and farmers started planting poppies once again. Heroin smuggling shot up. "The people need to earn money," says Shanawaz matter-of-factly.

Shanawaz doesn’t grow poppies. Neither do any other farmers around Kabul, mainly because the soil there is ill-suited for the crop. But he understands the politics of the heroin trade. By walking away from Afghanistan during the civil wars of the 1990s, says Shanawaz, the U.S. essentially guaranteed that drugs would flourish under the Northern Alliance warlords. "Now the U.S. feels the pain of forgetting Afghanistan," he says.

Shanawaz also understands the social impact for addicts in Afghanistan and the west. "It’s a big problem all over the world," he says, looking out over his land, "especially for the young generation. Now we have a new government. I hope for our people" that the heroin trade stops, he says.

But so far, it seems to be just the opposite. The U.S. is pursuing the same policies that led to the flourishing drug trade in past decades.

Peshawar, Pakistan

Ahmad points across the railroad tracks where regular Pakistani police don’t patrol. "That’s where the drug dealers are," he says. As if to emphasize the point, we hear several shots from an AK-47 rifle. "Don’t worry," says Ahmad, "when they see a foreigner, they like to have some target practice. But they’re not shooting at us." It’s purely an intimidation tactic, he explains.

Just to make sure they don’t aim our way, we go indoors.

Ahmad, who asks that his real name not be used, works for a local non-governmental organization which helps rehabilitate drug addicts. He’s a former drug user himself. Every week he checks the wholesale price of heroin so his group can better predict trends among addicts. Afghan and Pakistani addicts smoke a cheap grade of heroin. If the price of smokable heroin goes up, addicts will buy pharmaceutical opiates and inject them, leading to increases in hepatitis and AIDS.

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