The Drug Gangs of Afghanistan

[2RHPZ]

Terrorism's Harvest

How al-Qaeda is tapping into the opium trade to finance violence and destabilize Afghanistan

By TIM MCGIRK/KABUL

Monday, Aug. 09, 2004
U.S. forces on the trail of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of the Taliban in late 2001 didn't worry much about elderly, pious-looking men like Haji Juma Khan. A towering tribesman from the Baluchistan desert near Pakistan, Khan was picked up that December near Kandahar and taken into U.S. custody. Though known to U.S. and Afghan officials as a drug trafficker, he seemed an insignificant catch. "At the time, the Americans were only interested in catching bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar," says a European counterterrorism expert in Kabul. "Juma Khan walked."

That decision has come back to haunt the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan. Western intelligence agencies believe Khan has become the kingpin of a heroin-trafficking enterprise that is a principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. A Western law-enforcement official in Kabul who is tracking Khan says agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, after a tip-off in May, turned up evidence that Khan is employing a fleet of cargo ships to move Afghan heroin out of the Pakistani port of Karachi. The official says at least three vessels on return trips from the Middle East took arms like plastic explosives and antitank mines, which were secretly unloaded in Karachi and shipped overland to al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Khan is now a marked man. "He's obviously very tightly tied to the Taliban," says Robert Charles, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. Mirwais Yasini, head of the Afghan government's Counter-Narcotics Directorate, says, "There are central linkages among Khan, Mullah Omar and bin Laden."

The emergence of Khan's network reflects the challenges the U.S. still faces in Afghanistan as the U.S. struggles to hunt al-Qaeda's leaders, disarm Afghanistan's warlords and shore up President Hamid Karzai against a revived Taliban-led insurgency. The renewed trade in opium has worsened all those problems. The World Bank calculates that more than half of Afghanistan's economy is tied up in drugs. The combined incomes of farmers and in-country traffickers reached $2.23 billion last year — up from $1.3 billion in 2002. Heroin trafficking has long been the main source of funds for local warlords' private armies, which thwart Karzai's attempts to expand his authority beyond Kabul. But the drug trade is becoming even more dangerous: U.S. and British counterterrorism experts say al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales. Antidrug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative estimates run to tens of millions of dollars.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda don't grow the opium poppies. Their involvement is higher up the drug chain, where profits are fatter, and so is their cut of the deal. Yasini says the terrorists receive a share of profits in return for supplying gunmen to protect labs and convoys. Recent busts have revealed evidence of al-Qaeda's ties to the trade. On New Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel stopped a small fishing boat in the Arabian Sea. After a search, says a Western antinarcotics official, "they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of drugs." In January U.S. and Afghan agents raided a drug runner's house in Kabul and found a dozen or so satellite phones. The phones were passed on to the CIA station in Kabul, which found that they had been used to call numbers linked to suspected terrorists in Turkey, the Balkans and Western Europe. And in March U.S. troops searching a suspected terrorist hideout in Oruzgan province found opium with an estimated street value of $15 million.

Antidrug officials say the only way to cut off al-Qaeda's pipeline is to destroy the poppy farms. U.S. military commanders have been reluctant to commit the nearly 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to opium eradication, fearing that doing so would divert attention from the hunt for terrorists. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tapped top Drug Enforcement Administration official Harold Wankel to lead an intensified drive to nail kingpins, shut down heroin-production labs, eradicate poppy fields and persuade farmers to plant food crops. If the drug cartels aren't stopped, the U.S. fears, they could sow more chaos in Afghanistan — which al-Qaeda and the Taliban could exploit to wrest back power. Miwa Kato, a Kabul-based officer for the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, puts it this way: "The opium problem has the capacity to undo everything that's being done here to help the Afghans." Few outcomes would please America's enemies more.

— With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Elaine Shannon/ Washington
From the Aug. 09, 2004 issue of TIME magazine
webposted Aug. 02, 2004

[2RHPZ]

Britain's war on drugs is naive, says US

Policy clashes undermine Blair's pledge to end Afghanistan opium production

David Smith in Kabul
Sunday August 1, 2004
The Observer

The US has blamed Britain's 'lack of urgency' for its failure to arrest the booming opium trade in Afghanistan, exposing a schism between the allies as the country trembles on the brink of anarchy.

As a record opium harvest fuels the supply of heroin to Britain's streets, the US embassy in Kabul has revealed policy clashes which undermined Tony Blair's pledge to end Afghan poppy cultivation.

'You guys are here because you have a war on drugs,' one US official told The Observer. 'Less than 5 per cent of all opiates in North America come from Afghanistan; I'm here because we have a war on terror. It does produce slightly different emphases. Britain will achieve the results they want in 10 years and that's fast enough for them. We will achieve the result we want only if we do it more quickly.'

Responding to Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell's wish that drugs barons and traffickers be jailed before October's presidential election, the official said: 'Britain's attitude is a little naive. I can name several Afghan government ministers and regional warlords absolutely up to their necks in drugs money. I would not bet on any high profile arrests before the election.'

The war on drugs is seen as key to the allies' attempt to halt Afghanistan's violent disintegration and ensure the election goes ahead after two postponements. The effort suffered another blow last week when Médecins Sans Frontières - whose aid workers have weathered 24 years of Soviet invasion, civil war, Taliban tyranny and American bombing - announced it was pulling out because the country was too dangerous.

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of opiates and supplies the opium base for about 95 per cent of heroin consumed in the UK. Output was slashed by the Taliban during their last year in power in 2001, but rocketed twentyfold in the following two years, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. With another bumper crop this year, leading to cheaper and higher quality heroin in British cities, the recriminations are flying.

The Foreign Office, which leads the international effort and is funding £70 million over three years, was attacked last week by the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, which said: 'There is little, if any, sign of the war on drugs being won, and every indication that the situation is likely to deteriorate, at least in the short term.'

The Foreign Office claims it is developing with the US a 'common agenda and shared commitment for next year across the whole range of counter-narcotics work'. But non-government organisations working in Afghanistan fear that divisions between the allies have done irreparable damage already.

Earlier this year the US State Department's senior narcotics official, Robert Charles, accused Britain of squeamishness during a hearing entitled, 'Afghanistan: are British counter-narcotics efforts going wobbly?' British diplomats were reported to be furious.

But even moderate voices within the US embassy in Kabul have spelled out the gulf between its priorities and those of Britain.

The MPs' report last week confirmed that efforts to develop alternative livelihoods for the poppy farmers had yet to produce results. The area under poppy cultivation was forecast to grow to between 90,000 and 120,000 hectares this year, increasing the dependence of farmers on the crop and funding the defiance of central government by regional warlords.

The role of the military - currently at full stretch hunting Osama bin Laden - has been a bone of contention. The American official, who since giving this interview has left the embassy, continued: 'I was struck in our discussions with minister Rammell that the tick list of points from him had not changed one iota from a year ago, and the number one tick list point is always that coalition forces must be more aggressive and we need, in essence, a military solution by going after drugs labs.

'Our military is absolutely apoplectic at the thought of getting anywhere near any of these issues. They don't want to be dragged into a drug war like they were in South America and they don't want to do anything that will make their job harder. There's no question if you could go after the drug trade right now, in any way, shape or form, it's going to cause ripples. If we said fine, we're just going to give away money and attack drugs labs, you don't think that wouldn't cause instability?'

NGOs are angry at the allies' lack of a co-ordinated approach to law enforcement. Paul O'Brien, advocacy co-ordinator for Care International in Afghanistan, said: 'We are concerned the progress they're making is being oversold and the nature of the challenge is being underestimated. The rule of law is where the response has not been adequate. The international force on the ground has refused to take it on because there is insufficient political will. They wouldn't have had to eradicate if they'd taken it seriously at the start.'

[2RHPZ]

The Drug Gangs of Afghanistan

U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan have found that local tribesmen are not willing to help sweep al Qaeda camps for surviving terrorists and al Qaeda documents and munitions.

The tribes along the eastern border have more pressing financial matters to deal with than picking up a few bucks working for the Americans. The eastern Pushtun tribes control the most lucrative part of the country's drug trade. They not only grow poppies, but run most of the drug factories that refine the plants into drugs. Some of these facilities were wound inside of al Qaeda camps.

Since Pakistan stamped out the drug trade in the late 1990s, the Pushtun tribes there simply moved their operations across the border. In some cases, the 19th century border cuts right through the territory of tribes, leaving related clans on both sides of the border. The tribal cousins in Afghanistan were glad to get into the lucrative drug trade. They had noted how wealthy their Pakistani kinsmen had become growing poppies and refining them into opium, hashish, morphine and heroin. The evidence of this success was obvious. New trucks and SUVs, satellite dishes on newly built walled villas, new clothes and jewelry for the women and even schools for the kids.

This border region had long prospered from illegal activity. Smuggling had been a major business ever since the British set up and tried to guard the frontier. Gun running and banditry were considered a birthright. Earning a living with one's weapons was a Pushtun tradition going back thousands of years. And the fanatically religious Taliban, although they were brutal with banditry, were content to tolerate the drug business as long as they got a cut of the proceeds - $40-50 million a year. One reason the Taliban leadership, and bin Laden, have been so hard to catch is that these guys fled with a lot of their drug profits.

The Taliban banned poppy growing in 2000 in an attempt to gain international recognition of their government. This didn't work, and the Taliban dropped the ban just before they were run out of power. But the Northern Alliance also tolerated and taxed the drug trade in their territory, which was much smaller than the operations in the south.

Many tribes have run lucrative smuggling rackets for generations and consider the drug business a natural addition to this traditional trade. It's all very organized and everyone in the tribe benefits. In typical Afghan fashion, deals are made with the provincial governor and border guards to get the drugs out of the country. Where the border guards could not be bribed (as on the Iranian and Tajik borders), you went armed and fought your way through. The Iranians have been very hostile to the Afghan drug smuggling operation. In the first six months of 2001, Iranian troops and border police killed 221 drug runners. Afghan arrested another 1,489. Activity dropped after September 11, but is picking up again. There was less action on the Tajik border, guarded by two divisions of Russians, who tend to be pretty trigger-happy.

The drug business has spread the money around. The tribes that grow poppies get 30 times as much money for their crop than if they grew wheat. With the three years of drought, there is another bonus: poppies use only a quarter of the water wheat needs. The tribal territory the drugs pass through earns a fee from the smugglers to guarantee safe passage. Tribes on the Iranian border have taken over the smuggling end of things and often fight each other over who controls the most lucrative routes.

When U.S. troops moved into the territory of the drug tribes along the Pakistan border, they discovered two things. First, the Special Forces had little or no experience with these tribes and, two, the tribes wanted to keep it that way. The tribes were upset that this war on terrorism was interfering with their business. Foreigners, no matter how well armed, were not welcome. The tribes held their fire, but the threat was obvious. Not wanting to see one accidental (or otherwise) firefight escalate into a full-scale tribal war, America decided to put as few troops as possible into the area.

But it will probably get worse. The new government in Kabul has just restored the Taliban ban on poppy production. At the moment, the government has no troops or police to enforce the ban, as the Taliban did. But it's also important to note that the Taliban only outlawed Poppy cultivation, not smuggling. When the Poppy ban went into place, there were still several thousand tons of drugs waiting to be smuggled out of the country. So in 2001, the smuggling went on. Some suspect that the Taliban would have lifted the Poppy growing ban after a year anyway. If the new government does get its new army and police force organized, it might find taking on the drug tribes a losing proposition. This has been the experience in places like Colombia and Burma. In both places, thriving drug operations survived for decades in the face of government efforts to root them out by force.

Worse yet, when drug gangs manage to set up their own mini-governments, they are open to sheltering anyone with money, or other advantages. This includes terrorists. The United States is reluctant to get into battles with the tribes, and no central government in Afghanistan has been very successful at it either.

The Special Forces guys can see what's coming; it's time the rest of America does as well.

Written in 2002

[Argyll]

About the only good thing the Taliban did was to make the poppy growing illegal :(

Very interesting article

[ibstolidude]

About the only good thing the Taliban did was to make the poppy growing illegal :(

Very interesting article
It is true they made it illegal, however it was a paper law. They continued to export opium. Even in central A-stan, the heart of opium, those there will tell you that they never really stopped harvesting opium - even those that were former allies of the Taliban.