Pubdate: Sun, 03 Mar 2002
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2002 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: E.A. Torriero

AFGHAN OFFICIALS STRUGGLE TO STOP OPIUM BONANZA

Officials Struggle To Stop Production

SANGIN, Afghanistan -- The world's heroin pipeline is preparing for an 
unprecedented Afghan bumper crop despite the new government's proclamations 
outlawing it and the international community's promise to destroy it.

The illegal but very public and defiant growing of opium is a major source 
of embarrassment for the interim Afghan government and the Western allies 
supporting the new administration with money and military might. It shows, 
too, the vast extent of lawlessness that continues unchecked in much of the 
country after 23 years of civil war and shadow governments.

"We are powerless to stop it," said Haji Pir Mohammed, the top assistant to 
the governor of Helmand province, center of the region where up to 90 
percent of the world's heroin originates. "So we will do nothing."

Opium produces at least 10 times the profits other crops do, and even 
farmers who had never planted poppy fields are getting in on the bonanza 
this season.

"God willing, this will be the best year we have ever had," said Haji Ala 
Mohammed, 65, standing in the rows of plants on his land, which has 
produced opium for a quarter-century.

The American-led bombing of Afghanistan was designed to rid the country of 
the Taliban regime, the Arab terrorists it harbored and the flourishing 
drug network supported by them. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made 
destroying Afghanistan's opium fields a key part of his pitch for national 
support of the war on terrorism.

Vowing that "violators will be dealt with severely," the interim Afghan 
government announced with great fanfare in January that the cultivation and 
trafficking of opium were banned. But Afghan leaders have no muscle to 
enforce the declaration.

Anti-drug patrols are mostly a ragtag army of provincial soldiers who have 
not been paid in months because the government is broke. Thousands of the 
military men work behind the scenes in support of opium business, the 
government acknowledges.

Meanwhile, outlaw warlords--thrilled that the U.S. got rid of the Taliban 
for them--are the guardians of the drug trade. There are reports in the 
Helmand region of weapons and rocket launchers being stockpiled to protect 
growers, sellers and smugglers from government or foreign assault.

In this dusty village, which thrives solely on opium production, buyers and 
sellers in the markets are already calculating their huge takes from the 
spring harvest. Smugglers are plotting routes and hiring couriers to ferry 
the plastic bags of opium to heroin labs in Afghanistan and then ship the 
finished product to neighboring Iran, Pakistan and the former Soviet republics.

The opium trade has flourished here for decades. Profits helped pay for the 
resistance movement against Russian occupation, militant Arab training in 
Afghanistan and the financing of the brutal Taliban regime.

"Everyone I know is involved in this trade--tens of thousands of people," 
the government's Mohammed said from the provincial seat in Lashkar Gah, 40 
rugged miles to the south. "We can't throw a whole population in jail. 
There are not enough jails in the world to hold all of them. And if we 
throw just one of them in jail, we will have a revolt that we cannot handle."

Interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai said recently that he will not 
hesitate to call for American or international troops to help fight enemy 
warlords destabilizing the country. But the U.S. role is mostly confined to 
hunting down terrorists and advising Karzai. The international peacekeepers 
patrol only in Kabul.

U.S. bombs concentrated mostly on terrorist targets and did not aim for 
opium fields so as not to inflame passions among thousands of poor farmers, 
a Western diplomat in Kabul said. The Karzai government does not favor 
aerial eradication and says it will be used only as a last resort if 
growers resist government orders.

Troops And Tractors

In neighboring Kandahar, provincial officials said they would take it upon 
themselves to send Afghan troops and tractors to destroy opium fields in 
Helmand as the crop grows taller this spring.

When pressed on specifics, however, provincial leader Yusef Pashtun said 
only: "Let's just say we will do it. We will enforce the government ban."

But a clearly chagrined Bush administration admitted last week that 
Afghanistan continues to fail miserably in combating drug cultivation. U.S. 
law prohibits paying foreign farmers for their opium or its destruction. 
But as American officials push Afghanistan's neighbors to be more vigilant 
in drug interdiction at the borders, they are considering a program to 
reimburse growers for the cost of plowing their crops under.

"Then what am I supposed to do? Go beg in the bazaar?" said farmer 
Mohammed, who like many farmers in these dusty parts scoffed at suggestions 
that they would take a pittance for a crop that is worth about $150 per 
pound on the open market.

Promised alternative crop plans by aid agencies have been hamstrung by a 
painfully slow bureaucracy, Afghan officials charge. But it has been years 
since a foreign aid agency has worked here because of the threat of danger.

Outsiders are viewed with suspicion here. The few who visit usually come 
with an entourage of armed guards in army fatigues who keep a finger on the 
triggers of their automatic weapons and a close watch on crowds that 
quickly form around visitors.

Still, a team from the United Nations is expected this month to begin an 
assessment of how much money and convincing it would take to get opium 
growers to switch to wheat, cotton, potatoes, carrots and other crops.

Preliminary UN estimates put the cost of such a replacement program at $200 
million for Helmand province, the cradle of the world's opium production.

"We need to wean the peasants of Afghanistan away from growing the opium 
poppy, so crop substitution is required," said Herbert Okun, the U.S. 
member of the International Narcotics Control Board.

"It has to be serious, and it has to be sustained," Okun said at the UN 
last week. "We hope it will happen soon, and we hope it will be successful."

But under the most optimistic of timetables, tens of thousands of kilograms 
of opium will be sold and processed this year before initial UN assessments 
are finished.

The very Taliban that Western intelligence accuses of promoting and 
expanding the opium business took little time to stop it. According to U.S. 
drug enforcers, opium production fell up to 90 percent last year after the 
Taliban burned some fields and issued a strict order against opium growing.

The reasons behind the ban were unclear. But it forced the price of opium 
to increase tenfold and made opium dealers richer. The high demand, along 
with the lack of enforcement, has encouraged production.

Farmers and opium dealers plead the threat of poverty as the reason they do 
not want to grow alternative crops. While most opium growers still are 
poor, this bustling village, a two-hour drive over the desert from the 
nearest paved road, is prosperous by Afghan standards.

Shiny tractors and expensive four-wheel-drives thump through the muddy 
streets. Sometimes purchases are made with opium barters. Eight kilograms 
of opium will buy a used Toyota Land Cruiser. Vehicle repair shops are 
thriving. So, too, are the opium markets.

Lure Of Money

Twirling worry beads in his shop, opium dealer Tor Jhan says that opium may 
be bad for the rest of the world but it is good for poverty-ridden 
Afghanistan. In a country where a quarter of the 21 million Afghans depend 
on handouts, the gold watch on Jhan's wrist is worth more than the average 
Afghan earns in a year.

Jhan says he earns $10,000 to $12,000 annually, a princely sum for Afghans. 
His actual take may be three times as much, experts say. Three garbage bags 
filled with opium powder rested next to a scale.

"Without opium, this town is no more," he said. "There won't be a car in 
the street. Shops will close. We will go into the desert and die."

Ahmadullah Alizai, who runs one of the country's few drug prevention 
programs, in Kandahar, said few in the opium trade are willing to make 
sacrifices for a new government they don't trust. The local 
administration's token effort to combat the opium trade has been to shutter 
some markets in Kandahar.

"This opium crop is in the ground longer than we have had a new 
government," Alizai said of the 2-month-old administration. "We will stop 
the opium, but it will take a long, long time."
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MAP posted-by: Ariel