Pubdate: Wed, 24 Oct 2001
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2001 The Dallas Morning News
Contact:  http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Tod Robberson

THE OTHER WAR: LONG BEFORE THE BOMBING BEGAN, TALIBAN OUTLAWED OPIUM CROPS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - In a dusty, mite-infested crawl space underneath 
Peshawar's Jail Bridge, the hot topic of conversation was supply-and-demand 
economics as Riad Ali and three fellow addicts prepared their Sunday 
afternoon fix of heroin.

"It's getting very expensive. Last year, I paid 20 rupees for a gram. Now 
I'm paying 250," Mr. Ali, 26, said while flicking his cigarette lighter 
under a piece of foil holding a droplet of heroin. Like many addicts in 
Pakistan, he smokes the drug rather than injects it the way American 
junkies often do.

It could be time to get help, Mr. Ali said, because the price of addiction 
is almost too high to bear.

With that, he put his finger on a problem that is perplexing international 
counternarcotics officials: As much as the United States is trying to 
portray Afghanistan's Taliban leadership as the archenemy in the war on 
terrorism, the Taliban may have been the West's best friend in the war on 
drugs.

All of that might have changed with the initiation of hostilities between 
the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition after the Sept. 11 attacks on the 
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The rising price of heroin is the direct result of a 94 percent decline in 
Afghanistan's production of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, said 
Barnard Frahi, program director for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the U.N. 
Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

As recently as last year, Afghanistan was the biggest source of opium in 
the world, producing 3,275 metric tons of opium, according to U.N. estimates.

Those supplies have now been choked off - not because of the current U.S. 
bombardment of Afghanistan, but because the Taliban issued a religious 
decree long before the bombing began.

In 1999, the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, declared opium 
production to be un-Islamic and therefore banned it. Most of the nation's 
devoutly Muslim population abided by the decree in much the same way that 
Afghans accepted bans on women in the workplace, girls attending school, or 
other restrictions whose violation could result in harsh punishment, even 
death.

Potential setback huge

Now, international counternarcotics officials warn, Afghanistan's opium 
crop could come back with a flourish next year with the heavy U.S. 
bombardment and breakdown in Taliban control. Such a setback in one of the 
world's premier manual-eradication programs would be huge, they say.

"Today, of course, it is politically incorrect to say the Taliban did 
something right," Mr. Frahi said. "But, for the first time, we have seen a 
drop of 3,000 tons in opium production in Afghanistan."

He attributed the drop almost entirely to Taliban efforts to enforce its 
1999 eradication decree.

It takes roughly 10 tons of opium to make one ton of heroin, meaning the 
Taliban eradication removed about 300 tons of heroin from the world market.

Ironically, the opposition Northern Alliance, which controls only 10 
percent of Afghan territory, is known to control most of the nation's 
surviving opium trade. The United Nations estimates that 50 tons of opium 
are now being produced in Taliban-held areas, compared with 150 tons from 
areas under Northern Alliance control.

"Opium poppy is effectively eliminated in those parts of Taliban-controlled 
Afghanistan where it has been cultivated in recent years," said a U.N. Drug 
Control Program report prepared by a 12-member team of inspectors who 
fanned out across the country earlier this year.

The amount eradicated under the Taliban decree amounts to seven times the 
opium seized around the world last year. In 2000, Afghanistan accounted for 
75 percent of the world's opium production. Today, as a result of the 
eradication effort, its share of world production equals only 10 percent, 
according to U.N. estimates.

The U.S. State Department remains skeptical. In a report issued earlier 
this month, it acknowledged some reduction in the amount of acreage under 
cultivation in Taliban-controlled areas but said the Kabul government never 
ordered the nation's vast stockpiles of already-harvested opium to be 
destroyed.

The result, the State Department said, is that the Taliban continued to tax 
the sale of the nation's opium stockpiles and "presumably benefited 
substantially from resulting price increases."

The U.S. report also said the Taliban may have reversed itself and 
authorized new cultivation of opium in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Although the Taliban deserves credit for what it accomplished before the 
war began, Mr. Frahi said, the question of stockpiles warrants more 
international scrutiny.

"We know the Taliban is keeping stockpiles," he said. "But we don't know 
what the mullahs do with it. Do they keep it in kind? Do they convert it to 
cash?"

Afghans, who have cultivated opium for the last four decades, have widely 
adopted the drug as a form of currency within their nation, according to 
various studies. Opium is accepted as payment for purchases in stores or 
for services rendered. A farmer can buy on credit based on his anticipated 
opium harvest in the coming season. Instead of saving cash, many Afghans 
save dried opium in their homes.

"Opium poppy has played an increasingly important role in the livelihood 
strategies of rural communities in Afghanistan. As a nonperishable, 
low-weight, high-value product, opium is ideally suited to the war-damaged 
physical infrastructure of Afghanistan," the U.N. drug report stated.

The Taliban decree essentially cut off two-thirds of the income for 
Afghanistan's rural population. Because farmers had no time to replace 
their opium crops with other cash and food crops, the nation's food stocks 
rapidly diminished. War between the Taliban and Northern Alliance added to 
the problem.

Today, up to 6 million Afghans are in danger of starvation because of the 
resulting famine conditions across the country that existed long before the 
U.S. bombing campaign began.

Mr. Frahi said that cash-poor Afghans are swarming toward the borders of 
Pakistan and Iran, dumping their stockpiles of opium on smuggling markets 
to obtain quick cash. The Taliban is probably doing the same with its 
stockpiles. As a result, drug use in neighboring countries is skyrocketing, 
he added.

Pakistan and Iran are believed to have 1 million heroin addicts, according 
to U.N. estimates.

Before the Taliban began enforcing its opium-cultivation ban, a pound of 
opium was selling at around $40. In August, as opium crops virtually 
disappeared from the country, the price had skyrocketed to nearly $300 per 
pound. Today, Mr. Frahi said, the price is back down to around $40 because 
so many opium stockpiles are being dumped on the market.

No bargain for addicts

The savings have yet to be passed on to the consumer, much to the 
consternation of Mr. Ali and his friends. With the Pakistani rupee now 
exchanging at a rate of 61 to the dollar, he needs more than $4.50 a day to 
buy food and pay for heroin.

A few days ago, his brother, Inam Ullah, passed out next to the railroad 
tracks under the Jail Bridge after smoking a fix of heroin. He lost two 
toes to a train and now has a badly mangled foot that appears to be 
gangrenous. With money so tight, medical care is going to have to wait, the 
brothers said.

"I'm begging on the street. I go out and collect garbage to scavenge for 
scrap," Mr. Ali said. "It wasn't so hard when we needed 20 rupees a day. 
But nobody can come up with 250. It can't be done."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom