Pubdate: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) Copyright: 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Contact: http://www.stltoday.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/418 Author: Philip Dine, Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) POPPY CROP THREATENS NASCENT DEMOCRACY Helmand Province, Afghanistan For now, the cabbage-green rows of small poppies in the furrowed squares of land resemble any variety of legitimate crops. In a few months, these plants will stand out as a tall sea of crimson. Viewed from the window of a low-flying helicopter, new poppy fields come into view every few seconds, spread around a desolate landscape virtually unchanged for centuries in this remote part of Afghanistan. The houses are small, isolated and fashioned from mud, some with mud walls around them. There is no sign of mosques or schools, hospitals or stores. This is the epicenter of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. The nation's crop provides 87 percent of the world's opium, from which heroin is produced, according to the United Nations. Early indications are that Helmand, a province deep in southern Afghanistan bordering Pakistan, will produce half the world's supply of opium this year. The poppies are invaluable cash crops to farmers seeking to sustain their families, but dangerous to a young Afghan democracy. An unholy alliance is emerging among farmers, drug lords, Taliban remnants and al-Qaida fighters. Intelligence sources and Afghan officials cite mounting evidence that insurgents are using drugs to wreak havoc on Afghan society - including the corrupting of public officials - while also extracting funds from drug profits for their anti-government violence. The resulting tension was in evidence on a recent tour of the area by two U.S. gunships. The helicopters landed in a poppy field to give State Department officials and a reporter a chance to look around - for two minutes - encircled by guards with automatic weapons. The guards worry about violence, either from farmers who think their crop is threatened, or from insurgents protecting the poppy fields. "You can get on the ground, but that's when you're the most vulnerable," warned Ed Morris, lead pilot in the U.S. military detachment providing protective cover for joint Afghanistan-American drug-eradication efforts in this area. Drugs are already the nation's sole export of any magnitude, and threaten to turn it into a "narco-state," a country whose policies and politics are dominated by drug lords. "The concern is that this government will fail and fall and the country will be a breeding ground for terrorists again," says Doug Wankel, director of the Counter Narcotics Task Force at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. Former chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he is a native of Bowling Green, Mo. Poisoning "infidels" There is also a little-noted bonus for al-Qaida in the burgeoning heroin production. Afghan sources say the terrorist group has acknowledged in private sessions its satisfaction that expanding heroin use is poisoning "infidels" in other countries. One example is a skyrocketing rate of AIDS, sparked by dirty needles, in Russia and former Soviet republics. Kahir Ismailee of Kabul has worked for years with international groups on health, education and human rights issues in rural areas where anti-Western sentiment is strong. He says that in the terrorists' "jihad against all Westerners, one of their tactics to ruin a society was to make them addicts, so they export heroin to the Western countries." Ismailee says an influential Taliban cleric told him: "Drugs are illegal in Islam, but we want infidels to die." Mohammad Nabi Hussaini directs the poppy eradication program in the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics. It's dangerous work; when traveling around the country, he wears a turban to disguise himself. "They say this, if you go to their gatherings, their religious gatherings: 'Western countries, they are sending us alcohol, they are sending us rockets - this is our rocket, poppy. This is how we can fight them,' " Hussaini says. "But they are also fighting their own people, because it brings the moral degradation of our society. It is against Islam." And, he noted, more Afghans are becoming addicted to heroin or opium. "It's not true that it's not our problem. It's becoming our problem," he says. "The rate of addiction will increase, I think, very badly. I believe it is something that is destroying our nation. My village has 120 families. When I was a kid, there was only one person who was taking raw opium, who was an addict. Right now in my village there are more than 12 very hard addicts." Afghan President Hamid Karzai has put it bluntly: "If we don't destroy the poppy, it will destroy us." The last two years have been the biggest in history for opium production in Afghanistan, each topping 4,000 tons of opium, and this year looms as a third banner year. Hoping to avert another flooding of the heroin market, Afghan forces and their allies, particularly the United States, are responding strongly - if belatedly - to the threat. Eradication is one element in a multipronged response to the mounting drug problem, an effort that also includes a range of educational, economic and legal approaches. The point man for the U.S. State Department is St. Louis native Tom Schweich, a top official for international narcotics and law enforcement who seeks to coordinate actions among Americans, Afghans and their international partners. "The reason we went into Afghanistan was to eliminate the people who were responsible for 9/11," Schweich says. "There's now a nascent democracy here. The threats that are posed to this democracy are narcotics and terrorism. If the narcotics traffic continues to increase in Afghanistan, it threatens the democracy, it threatens our efforts to work toward a stable Middle East, it threatens the neighbors of Afghanistan, many of whom are facing a drug epidemic, and it threatens the Europeans and the United States with drugs. It really does have implications across the entire world." The Taliban and the poppy In some ways, the proliferation of poppy is an unintended consequence of the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. In earlier years, the Taliban had been content to allow the production of opium, even urging farmers to continue in defiance of the desire of the West that poppy cultivation cease - and often profiting from drug trafficking. "The Taliban told people this was a fight against Muslims, that you should grow poppy. Even if you have no land, you should use your roof," says Asadullah Khalid, governor of Kandahar province. But the Taliban abruptly switched gears at the start of this decade, as it faced growing international pressure to moderate its rule. Hoping to win diplomatic recognition from the West, the Taliban knew it had to make some concessions, and yielding on narcotics was the most palatable choice, Ismailee says. In its last years in power, the Taliban clamped down on the drug trade in an effective but brutal way. "There were executions without any transparent trials, hands were cut off, legs were severed," Ismailee says. By 2001, the extremist government had reduced the opium production to virtually nothing. The U.S.-led removal of the Taliban removed the fear ordinary Afghans felt, spurring many to get back into poppy farming. In addition, American and Afghan policies initially contributed to the growth of the narcotics problem. U.S. forces enlisted the support of warlords in the fight against the Taliban, turning a blind eye to their drug trafficking. After he assumed office, Karzai - hoping to solidify his hold on the country - brought some compromised provincial figures into his government. Now, insurgents trying to weaken the U.S.-backed government find it advantageous to forge alliances with drug traffickers and encourage farmers to grow poppy - telling them "whenever the government tries to eradicate, the Taliban will be there to protect you," Ismailee says. Insurgents also have issued warnings that those who stop growing poppy will be seen as "siding" with the government. It is no coincidence, officials say, that the areas where anti-government rebels are strongest are the same places where poppy production is at its highest. Corruption, poverty, porous borders Other factors have helped worsen the drug problem in Afghanistan. Corruption, bribery and the quick release from jail of suspected drug traffickers. Widespread poverty, which forces farmers to seek any possible means to support their families. Other crops pay a fraction of what poppies yield. And many traditional Afghanistan crops, such as fruits and nuts, were uprooted when Soviet troops destroyed trees to prevent guerrillas from hiding. The return of Afghan refugees who had fled to Pakistan to escape Taliban rule. Some went into poppy farming on their own; others were compelled by landowners who made it a condition of their getting a parcel of land as tenant farmers. Abysmal roads. Farmers often can't get legitimate crops to market, whereas poppy is so valuable that traffickers will come to the farmers. The trend toward the processing of opium into heroin in Afghanistan, turning Afghans from opium exporters into heroin producers. Afghans have seen the profits to be made and, in recent years, provided necessary precursor chemicals by foreigners, began setting up their own labs to make the end product. Porous borders that let drugs move freely into Iran, Pakistan or former Soviet republics to the north, often eventually going to Europe - - which gets 90 percent of its heroin from Afghanistan. The hardiness of the crop. Poppies require little care and little water, critical in a country suffering from massive environmental degradation and long arid periods and whose mountainside irrigation systems were largely destroyed over decades of armed conflict. "The narcotics problem in our province is very, very complicated," said Engineer Daud, governor of Helmand, as he stood at an airfield flanked by Afghan and U.S. troops. "Our land is productive land for narcotics, and we have more than 100 miles of border with Pakistan, with deserts and mountains," he says. "Because of the low capacity of our national police, it is difficult to control that part of the problem. Drug dealers and terrorists are carrying drugs across the border, and terrorists are getting money from narcotics." "Both forces are mobilizing" In the northern part of his province, people are so desperate for water that farmers trying to make a legitimate living on their tiny plots, with virtually no money for their own families, are forced to buy water to keep their chickens alive. Daud understands why they "have the reason to cultivate cash crop like poppy," and he prefers to go after the larger and wealthy drug dealers rather than the simple growers, but the traffickers are more evasive, more powerful - and more threatening. In many ways, Afghan officials and their international allies, preoccupied with overthrowing the Taliban and then keeping it and al-Qaida at bay, were caught off guard by the insidious drug trade and didn't get serious until relatively recently. "The problem was . . . unique, because of its scope and because there are so many moving parts," said Craig Chretien, formerly a senior official at the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he spent 26 years in several South American countries. He is now deputy director of the counternarcotics task force at the American Embassy in Afghanistan, which is helping the Afghans tackle the problem. "It's challenging, but is it impossible? No," Chretien says. After a rather tepid Afghan response last year, and some faltering steps by the United States, both countries are launching a broader, better coordinated and more aggressive campaign. The next few months will begin to signal how successful the effort is likely to be. "We've got an increased ability to fight the drugs, and they've got an increased ability to grow the drug," Schweich says. "So both forces are mobilizing." - --- MAP posted-by: Derek