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."
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MAP posted-by: Derek