Pubdate: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 Source: Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong) Copyright: 2001 Review Publishing Company Limited Contact: http://www.feer.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1191 Author: Bertil Lintner, Chiang Mai TALIBAN TURNS TO DRUGS The Taliban Is Reported To Have Already Lifted A Ban On Poppy Cultivation Amid Western Fears That It Will Also Unload Its Large Stockpiles Of Opium And Heroin Bracing for a new war, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban is desperate for money. Unfortunately its war-ravaged and impoverished country has only one very exportable commodity: drugs. Some press reports say the Taliban has told farmers they can plant poppy seeds if the United States attacks. In fact, according to a Western intelligence source monitoring Taliban-run Voice of Shariat radio, the Taliban has already scrapped a ban on poppy cultivation, clearing the way for renewed opium and heroin production after little more than a year's break. The source says the move was announced on September 2--nine days before hijacked airliners slammed into New York and Washington. The timing however didn't fuel suspicions that the Taliban had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks, the source adds. Instead it appeared consistent with widespread speculation among farmers and drug traffickers in August that the ban might be rescinded. The poppy planting season in Afghanistan starts in late September and farmers would need to know in advance that they had to buy seeds. Western intelligence officials also expect the Taliban to release large stockpiles of opium and heroin. The coalition being formed by the United States is well aware of the imminent threat of tonnes of Afghan drugs being dumped on foreign markets. Says a Western intelligence official: "Naval forces in the [Persian] Gulf and armed forces on the ground will be looking to intercept and destroy drug shipments." Though Afghanistan's borders are now officially closed and surveillance has been tightened the flood of Afghan drugs may well continue, as smuggling routes across the northern frontier are unlikely to be affected. According to Vienna-based narcotics enforcement officers, a well-established route to Europe is via the Central Asian republics and a network of Chechen gangsters and Kosovo-Albanian syndicates. Once best-known for its hashish, Afghanistan started producing opium and its derivative heroin as a direct legacy of years of war and the destruction of its traditional cash crops. According to estimates by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Afghanistan produced no more than 10 tonnes of opium annually prior to the late 1970s. The amount rose to some 300 tonnes in 1986 and by 1989--the year that Soviet forces pulled out-- it reached 1,200 tonnes. The withdrawal led to power struggles between factions of the former resistance, which each needed cash to survive. So in the late 1990s, Afghanistan overtook Burma as the world's biggest opium producer and by 1999 4,600 tonnes was harvested--more than twice Burma's production. Most of the increase was from Helmand province, west of the Taliban headquarters at Kandahar. The United Nations estimates the value of the opium crop "at farmgate prices" in 1999 to be $251 million, a huge sum for such a poor country. Much Afghan opium is refined into heroin destined mainly for Western Europe. In contrast, Southeast Asian heroin sells mainly in East Asia, Australia and North America. Southeast Asian heroin, known as "China White"--though all of it is produced in Burma's sector of the Golden Triangle--is purer and more expensive. But Afghanistan in recent years began producing white heroin as well as the brown powder Afghan heroin that had been processed since the early 1990s. The quality is not yet as good as Southeast Asian white heroin, but Thai narcotics officials say Afghan producers smuggle heroin into Thailand and repack it in plastic bags with well-known Southeast Asian brand names. It is then re-exported to North America and elsewhere, disguised as more expensive Southeast Asian heroin. Afghan-produced heroin is also smuggled into China's Xinjiang region, where Uighur Muslim traffickers transport it to Shanghai and other coastal cities where "white powder" is in great demand. Osama Bin Laden's Role Severe international criticism and U.S. and UN sanctions prompted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar to issue a decree on July 27 last year banning opium cultivation across the country. Independent verification by UN observers this year indicated a very substantial reduction of the area under poppy cultivation. However, Western narcotics officials noted that although poppy farmers lost their income, stockpiles from earlier bumper crops meant traffickers were not affected. Nor were the authorities, which still taxed the processing and transportation of heroin and what poppy production remained. As supposed religious purists, the Taliban have an ambivalent attitude toward drugs. A U.S. anti-narcotics official says Taliban officials maintain cultivating opium poppies "does not violate the principles of Islam, but that heroin processing, trafficking and the use of heroin is wrong for all Muslims [and therefore] all heroin must be intended for export to foreign, non-Muslim countries." A U.S. congressional panel last December said: "Colombia and Afghanistan provide the clearest examples of the growing convergence among drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime." In March this year, President George W. Bush said that both Burma and Afghanistan, despite its opium poppy ban, hadn't done enough to be certified as cooperating in the fight against illegal drugs. Osama bin Laden's role is shadowy but Western intelligence officials say that he was very upset when he lost major sources of income from several construction businesses, which had to close down under U.S. pressure after the bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The officials say bin Laden took revenge by extending his jihad, or holy war, to include drug-running to the United States and Europe. One official says he met four senior Afghan drug traffickers linked to the Taliban and offered to help fund their shipments to Europe in return for a cut of the profits. Bin Laden is also said to employ drug runners for other purposes. The Western intelligence official says established smuggling routes double as conduits for explosives and illegal immigrants. And in order to transfer large sums of money without leaving an obvious paper trail, bin Laden uses the hawala system of moving funds with just a handshake and a largely indecipherable piece of paper. If the drugs do flow, hawala could be working even harder in the coming months. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth