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the ban might be rescinded.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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth