The Opium Country
By Nick Meo
19 November 2004
The Independent
Sowab
Khan claims he has planted no opium this year. Onions and wheat are
all that will be sprouting in his fields after the Kabul government
issued a ban, he insisted yesterday, although a teacher in a nearby
school said every farmer in the district grows poppy because they would
be fools to grow anything else.
For dirt-poor farmers,
opium brings 10 times the price of wheat. And they have never had it
so good. Three years after the fall of the Taliban, the crop demonised
by the West is flourishing in the new Afghanistan it has forged. This
year, 1,300 square kilometres of poppies were growing, an all-time high.
Many fear bloodshed
and increased instability if the drugs war becomes a shooting war, as
looks almost inevitable. In Kabul, it is increasingly obvious that drugs
money is taking over the city and rebuilding it. Construction sites
where fake marble mansions are sprouting and roads are clogged with
fleets of expensive four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers are testimony to
the profits of a trade spawning epic corruption eating at the new Afghanistan
from the inside.
The involvement
of government officials, police officers and warlords making vast profits
is discussed by diplomats and drugs experts in private. In public, none
of the key players have been named.
High-profile raids
are promised by interdiction teams such as Force 333, the British Army-trained
Swat team which reportedly wiped out 50 heroin laboratories this year.
Yet they have not arrested even one of the known big players.
An Afghan aid worker
in Jalalabad was scathing. "A ban on cultivation will just mean
prices go much higher, and that will make money for warlords who hold
big stockpiles. People say one of the local officials in Nangarahar
Province has 700 tons of opium. These are guys who used to fight the
Taliban for the Americans; now they are making big money out of opium.
Nobody wants this business in Afghanistan. But will the government go
after the big players who create a market and run the trade or will
they go after the farmers who are trying to survive?"
Aid workers are
also concerned about the shape of the new drugs war. Dave Mather, from
AfghanAid, said farmers should be given more help to reduce their dependency
on growing opium. "Nobody wants to live in a narco-state but if
we saw a similar commitment to dealing with people at the top as with
the powerless opium poppy farmer, a lot of people would have more faith
in a war on drugs."
Many of the prisoners
inside Pul-e-Charki jail near Kabul are in for drugs offences. But they
are small-time smugglers and dealers. One inmate, Kochi, who has been
held for four months and says he is innocent, told the BBC: "From
where I'm seeing it, these drugs barons have connections with the government
and that's why they're never arrested. I think if the government took
it seriously they could arrest the big guys rather than teasing small
people like me."
Although dealers
and smugglers are likely targets for Western soldiers, the risk is high
that 2.3 million farmers like Sowab Khan and their families who depend
on poppy for livelihoods may become collateral damage. Eradication,
the solution Kabul's government and its Western backers favour, threatens
to beggar many farmers
As their fields
are destroyed, the price of warlords' hoarded opium is sure to increase.
In Jalalabad, in the past two months, just talk of eradication has pushed
the price up from $70 (£38) a kilo to $400, profits made by dealers
not farmers. Alternative livelihoods, such as planting different crops,
are widely touted by Western politicians including the Foreign Office
minister Bill Rammell, who insisted yesterday that British-led anti-narcotics
efforts in Afghanistan are on the right track.
Nobody has found
an alternative crop Afghan farmers will plant, because they know that
with no roads to take crops to market there is nothing else they can
grow that will pay for their childrens' clothes or repairs to their
homes. To the farmer, the prospect of losing his only cash crop in Afghanistan's
looming drugs war threatens his family with starvation. "We will
have to leave again and go to Pakistan to a refugee camp, like we did
when the Russians were here," Sowab Khan said.
Many farmers such
as Mr Khan in Rohdat district, near Jalalabad in the east of Afghanistan,
have already borrowed heavily from moneylenders to plant opium. Now
they face financial disaster as massive eradication is promised to slay
the dragon of the opium trade before it consumes the new democracy George
Bush promised Afghans when he toppled the Taliban three years ago.