Pubdate: Thu, 13 Jan 2005
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2005 Independent Media Institute
Contact:  http://www.alternet.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1451
Author: Christian Parenti, The Nation
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

AFGHAN POPPIES BLOOM

The rotund landlord, Mr. Attock, sits on the carpeted floor of his
little office and living quarters in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. From this
one room he publishes a slight and sporadic weekly or sometimes
monthly newspaper, but like most people around here, his real business
is farming opium poppy. Mr. Attock's land lies about an hour and a
half away in the countryside of Nangarhar province, near the Pakistani
border, not too far from Tora Bora.

"My dear, everyone grows poppy. Even me," says Mr. Attock in slightly
awkward English as he leans over to grab my leg, again. Mr. Attock is
a bundle of physical and intellectual energy, not all of it well
focused. "My dear, you see. Listen. My dear, wheat is worthless.
Everyone grows poppy. We will go to my village and you will see."

The next day we tour the village where Mr. Attock owns or manages a
farm (it's not entirely clear who actually owns the establishment, but
he is in charge). Nangarhar is one of Afghanistan's top three
drug-producing provinces. The surrounding fields rotate between corn
and poppies. Mr. Attock says he has almost 100 people living and
working here as tenant farmers and laborers.

For the past three years, growing poppy in Afghanistan, as Mr. Attock
and his tenants do, has been a relatively risk-free and open business.
The Taliban had imposed a ruthlessly successful ban on poppy
cultivation in 2000; more than 90 percent of cultivation stopped. But
since the U.S. invasion in 2001, eradication efforts have been minimal
and ineffective and production has again soared.

Globally, Afghanistan's opium business is estimated to be worth more
than $30 billion a year, with the vast majority of that cash being
captured by players in other countries. One Western counternarcotics
official estimated that poppy production increased by 64 percent in
2004. Afghanistan now produces an estimated 87 percent of the world's
opium, most of which becomes heroin and morphine. Income from poppy
and its associated processing and trafficking are said to contribute
$2.8 billion annually to the Afghan economy, a sum equal to 60 percent
of the country's legitimate GDP. About a quarter of this money ends up
in the hands of common farmers; the rest goes to traffickers.

UN researchers believe that 2.3 million of Afghanistan's 20-25 million
people are directly involved in poppy cultivation, with many more
working in processing, trafficking, moneylending, laundering and other
associated activities. The warlords who run this country tax both
farmers and traffickers alike.

The British, who are part of the international coalition now occupying
Afghanistan, have been in charge of establishing a Counter Narcotics
Directorate in Kabul. Its efforts have not been aggressive, and until
recently the Americans have openly avoided the issue of poppy
cultivation, preferring to focus instead on hunting down the Taliban
and al Qaeda and training the new Afghan National Army.

But after three years of ignoring poppy cultivation and heroin
production, the United States has suddenly changed course. In
mid-November Washington pledged $780 million toward Afghanistan's war
on drugs. If a rigorous campaign against poppy actually materializes,
it could radically destabilize the relative calm that now obtains in
much of Afghanistan.

Already there is trouble brewing in Nangarhar, where next year's crop
is just starting to sprout. Farmers report low-flying planes spraying
poison on their fields. Doctors in the area say they've seen a sudden
jump in respiratory illness and skin rashes, while veterinarians are
seeing sickened livestock. In a harbinger of what a real war on drugs
might bring, one farmer in Nangarhar whose son had been poisoned by
the spraying told a local journalist, "If my son dies, I will join the
Taliban, and I will kill as many Americans as I can find."

Nangarhar's provincial governor, a former mujahedeen commander named
Haji Din Mohammed, has said there is "no doubt that an aerial spray
has taken place." Other Afghan officials have called it illegal. The
United States controls Afghan airspace but denies that it has sprayed,
though it is promising a "robust" eradication campaign come spring.

Mr. Attock is reveling in his role as country squire and host. At his
village we sit on cots made of rope and wood to eat a breakfast of
thick clotted butter cream, honey and flat bread, washed down with
lots of sweet tea. As I wait beneath a huge tree in the courtyard of
Mr. Attock's kala, a fortress-like family compound, he corrals three
farmers and tells them to fetch opium and opium seeds, to take seats
and to explain the trade to his guest.

The three farmers, all of them lean and sinewy and looking a bit
skeptical, take seats and politely start talking shop. For the most
part, growing opium in Afghanistan is like growing any other crop.
Though technically illicit, it's all rather undramatic: Farmers are
concerned with irrigation, weather, pests, disease and prices. Their
tasks are similarly prosaic, consisting mainly of weeding, watering
and tending the crops.

The most talkative and inquisitive farmer is Abdul Rakmon. For every
few questions from me he has one of his own. "Have you been to
Fremont, California? Some people from around here live there now.
Where exactly is Fremont?"

Rakmon and his less talkative mates explain that in the warm climate
of Nangarhar there is one crop of poppy, though in other areas there
are two seasons, the second less productive than the first. In
Nangarhar the land is fertilized with manure in late October, and then
the poppy seeds are sown in November. By February the flowers bloom,
then the blossoms fall away to reveal a bulging seedpod. In March the
farmers start harvesting the opium by cutting or scraping the seedpods
with small trowels.

 From the little scrape wounds oozes a sticky white sap - raw opium.
The milk-colored opium turns brown with exposure to air. In Nangarhar
the farmers cut the seedpods in the evening and collect the congealed
sap in the morning.

"We cut the seedpod with a ghoza," says Rakmon, and he gives me a
little wooden tool with a serrated metal edge. "You can have this
ghoza as a present. People in New York will be impressed when they see
that," he says with a grin. He's making a sage but cryptic comment on
the huge physical, but even greater social, distance between heroin's
site of production and its site of consumption. In front of us sits a
big sickly-sweet-smelling block of opium.

Ms. Attock has become bored with the interviews and is done eating. He
struts around the dusty courtyard, occasionally hoisting himself up
off the ground on a tree branch. He wants my colleague, the
photographer Teru Kuwayama, to take snapshots of his buildings and
retinue of friends and employees from the village.

"What is his name? He looks like a Hazara," says Attock, referring to
the Afghan ethnic minority known for their East Asian facial features.

"His Name Is Teru."

"Yes, OK. Steve!" shouts Mr. Attock, still unable to get Teru's name
right. "Steve! Come. Take photos." The farmers tell me that the
flowers come in red, white and purple. "Red flowers are the best,"
says Rakmon. In cooler climates other farmers inform me that white
blossoms are superior.

Rakmon and his two friends explain that in most parts of Afghanistan a
farmer can get up to seven collections from each seedpod.

Eventually the plant is tapped out and left to dry. The desiccated
seedpods are harvested for next year's planting and the seeds are used
to make edible oil. Mothers sometimes boil the dry pods into a tea
that they use to drug their infants during long hours of work, or when
the children are sick or hungry and unable to sleep.

To illustrate the financial plight that drives people here to grow
poppy - which, as good Muslims, they see as a sin - the farmers
explain the math of poppy versus wheat. The local unit of land
measurement here, a jerib, is roughly half an acre; and this part of
Afghanistan is so close to Pakistan that commerce is conducted in
Pakistani rupees instead of afghanis.

"It costs 1,000 rupees to plant one jerib of poppy, and that one jerib
will yield at least 15 kilograms of poppy, which is worth 300,000
Pakistani rupees [$5,000], at least," says a farmer named Lal
Mohammed. (Later in the central highlands, some farmers tell me they
can get 28 kilos of opium per jerib.) "Wheat takes twice as long as
poppy to grow, and we can buy almost ten times as much wheat as we
could produce if we grow poppy instead," says Mohammed. "We have no
choice but to grow poppy."

To top it all off, Afghanistan is in the midst of a hellacious
six-year drought. Unlike wheat and vegetables or cotton, poppy is very
drought-resistant. "All it really needs is a little water early on,"
says Mohammed.

The farmers confirm what I've heard elsewhere: The opium boom of the
past three years has delivered many farmers from onerous debts and
allowed them to keep land that they would otherwise have been forced
to sell off to the local mujahedeen commanders.

After all the details of poppy growing are explained, Mr. Attock takes
us on a tour of his village and invites me to shoot at a tree with one
of his double-barreled shotguns. "Into the leaves, my dear. Up into
the leaves. Yes!" The tree survives. Then we have more tea.

Later about six of us pack into a little Toyota four-wheel drive and
slowly bounce and lurch down a sandy road lined with tall reeds
through a string of small villages. At one of these clusters of
mud-walled compounds we stop, interview another group of farmers about
local politics and opium, then have a lunch of greasy rice and lamb
and smoke hash with our hosts. This is haram, forbidden, in Islam. But
way out here, is Allah really counting the minor indiscretions?
Apparently some farmers think not.

On the dirt road back to Jalalabad, we stop to take photos. Around the
bend rolls a small convoy of menacing U.S. Special Forces, all
mirrored sunglasses, beards and guns. The dreamy afternoon starts to
feel creepy and not safe.

In the central highlands of Wardak province - which along with
Nangarhar is one of the top opium-producing areas in Afghanistan and
set to be targeted in the upcoming American-led eradication efforts -
a different group of poppy farmers explains other aspects of the trade
and the process of smuggling.

Teru and I are visiting friends of his who live in a series of
picturesque villages strung out along a stunningly beautiful valley -
lush and green at the bottom but hemmed in by huge, dry rocky mountains.

The family we're staying with is fairly prosperous, with some brothers
and cousins working in Kabul, others involved in trucking and many
others farming the valley's abundantly watered land. We spend most of
our time drinking tea, cracking jokes and eating. There's growing
political tension around here, so our hosts allow us to take only one
hike. Nor do they want too many people to see them wandering around
with foreigners.

I ask the farmers here about loans, because debt is said to be one of
the ways big traffickers control little farmers. "No, no. The
smugglers do not lend money," says a man named Nazir. "Mostly we have
to borrow from merchants in the bazaar. You have to come up with your
own money." Western experts had told me the smugglers make cash loans
that are repaid at 100 percent interest, but in opium instead of cash.
The system in Wardak seems to be less onerous, more streamlined, less
formalized. And it externalizes risk for the lenders: Farmers purchase
on credit from shopkeepers to survive, then repay in cash after
payment from smugglers.

"Why would the smugglers want to lend us money? They know we have to
grow poppy to survive," says Nazir, sounding like he wishes he could
get a cash loan instead of store credit.

"The smugglers who take the opium away have the most dangerous job,
you know. They get robbed. The commanders and police can attack them.
It's very dangerous," says Nazir. "The worst that happens to farmers
is their crops get destroyed. And this year we lost most of our poppy
to disease anyway."

Nazir and his cousins say that the smaller smugglers tend to sell
their loads to wholesalers, who often work with the authorities and
use official vehicles and state-issued travel documents to move their
consolidated loads into Iran and Pakistan. But such cover isn't always
necessary.

"The border at Chaman, in Pakistan, is wide open," says one of Nazir's
cousins. "I've crossed there without talking to anyone. You just drive
across."

To turn opium into heroin it must be boiled down with lye to make
morphine, then further refined with other chemicals. Western
counternarcotics specialists and UN researchers say that Afghan opium
has typically been processed into heroin by labs in Pakistan. But with
the new opium boom, these labs are said to be moving into Afghanistan,
making the smuggling operations more efficient and profitable. The
guys in Wardak say there are some small labs in the area around their
group of villages.

"Some young people smoke heroin, about 100 of them around here. That's
a big problem for us," says a man named Hazrad. He speaks English,
which most of his cousins can't understand too well. "They dip
cigarettes in it and just smoke it. Some of them steal to get money."
When I ask how the community is dealing with this he grows reticent
and uncomfortable.

According to the farmers, the route into Pakistan seems to rely
heavily on concealment within other commodities like wheat and rice or
in fuel tankers, and the official border crossing is used. Smuggling
into Iran is usually done with long, well-armed convoys of trucks or
camels that try to avoid, or if necessary outgun, any Iranian border
police they might meet. Violent clashes are routine, and Tehran
reports that it has lost 3,100 security personnel over the past two
decades in battles with well-armed and -organized smugglers on the
Afghan border. Almost 200 soldiers and 800 traffickers were killed in
2003 alone.

When I ask about U.S. plans to target Wardak in the spring of 2005,
Nazir and the others grow concerned. "We have many former Taliban and
mujahedeen commanders here who are getting angry at America because of
what is happening in Palestine and Iraq and because the economy here
is no good," says Nazir. "Cutting down poppy will only make them more
angry." Already violence is on the rise in Wardak. People who work
with the occupying forces are starting to be targeted by unknown assassins.

If poppy eradication threatens instability in Afghanistan, why is the
United States now stepping up its war on drugs? Officially, the
counternarcotics wonks in Kabul give all the right ethical arguments:
Poppy is an evil fueling everything from Islamic terrorism to the
spread of HIV.

But the poppy revival has also been clearly linked to a decline in
rural indebtedness and an improvement in the status and standard of
living of many women. Because opium harvesting is both labor-intensive
and lucrative, it provides economic opportunities for Afghan women,
many of whom either cultivate poppy on their own land or work as
relatively well-compensated wage laborers in the fields of others. The
average wage for gathering opium can be as high as $7 a day. In Kabul
a day laborer who works on a construction site or hauls goods can
expect to make only $3 a day.

And the practice of turning a blind eye to the opium industry has
functioned as a de facto development strategy in Afghanistan: It is
probable that ordinary Afghans receive more income from drugs than they
do from all the international aid they receive.

But across the planet in Washington, Afghanistan's poppy crop is
viewed through the lens of reactionary moralism and domestic political
theater rather than imperial pragmatism. And now powerful politicians
want a better Afghan drug war.

The first demands came in 2003, when Republican Rep. Henry Hyde sent a
high-profile letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressing
his "growing concern about Afghanistan and the impact of illicit drugs
on the fight against global terrorism."

This plea seemed to bear fruit. On a surprise visit to Kabul in August
2004, Rumsfeld singled out drugs as a problem "too serious to be
ignored." In turn, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, said he expected "some broadening" of the U.S.-led
coalition's military efforts against poppy.

A Western official in Kabul told me that the United States was indeed
ramping up its war on drugs and building a "pretty full partnership
with the UK and Afghan government." He said that economic aid of
between $30 million and $40 million had already arrived and would soon
be invested in antipoppy economic development, or "the alternative
livelihoods program." This scheme will involve creating cold storage
facilities, communications links and improved roads, all with the aim
of connecting traditional crops such as apples and raisins to world
markets. But even the program's proponents admit that "nothing will
replace opium." This bit of carrot will then be followed by the stick:
an aggressive campaign of crop eradication to begin in February.

"In 2005 eradication will be considerably more robust. At least five
times as much poppy will be cut down as compared to last year," said
the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

But to destroy the flowers is to destroy the lives of poor farmers. If
wide and aggressive, such an assault could lead to a new jihad. Some
observers have even credited the quick fall of the Taliban to the
former regime's unpopular ban on poppy cultivation, a policy that left
them with very few allies once the U.S. bombs began falling.

Further complicating any real war on drugs would be the international
community's open alliance with Afghanistan's mujahedeen warlords, or
jangsalaran, many of whom might turn on the occupation if their sub
rosa economic activities are attacked. As one U.S. soldier in Kandahar
explained to the English 'Independent', "We start taking out drug
guys, and they will start taking out our guys." The security chief in
Nangarhar, Hazrat Ali, a U.S. ally, is said to be heavily involved in
the drug trade. And now American officials have started to threaten
him. "One day, he will wake up and find out he's out of business,"
Col. David Lamm, chief of staff for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said
of Hazrat Ali in a recent press interview. If Hazrat Ali is targeted,
it's unlikely that he'll go quietly.

Back in Wardak the impending war on poppy is viewed by the Muslim
farmers as hypocritical and cruel. Just before we take leave of Nazir
and his cousins, he asks me: "Why does America allow people to sell
alcohol but not heroin? What is the difference? At least in Islam both
are haram." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake