With Taliban gone, poppy crops return

By Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune,
26 December 2001

SORUKH ROAD, Afghanistan -- The muddy waters of the Red River are eked out carefully in the fields of Sorukh Road, a parched farming village largely depopulated by two punishing years of drought.

Some of the irrigation water trickles into plots of cauliflower. A little is channeled to struggling crops of winter wheat. But a growing volume of the precious liquid is being diverted--as it is in hundreds of other Afghan villages today--to fields greening with tiny new leaves.

It is good to be growing poppies again, said Muhammad Tauib, a barefoot farmer who is replanting his fields with the narcotic plant once banned by Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. At least my family will be able to eat.

In fact, Tauib's family never stopped relying on the illicit crop, even when the Taliban outlawed all drug cultivation in Afghanistan last year. To survive the drought, he and other villagers simply fell back on sales from their large hoards of opium gum, the source of heroin.

As the political seasons change in Afghanistan, a troubling new crop of drugs is sprouting once more, boding poorly for the return of law and order to this war-battered country.

With the recent defeat of the Taliban regime by the United States and its Afghan allies, the harsh anti-drug laws imposed by the old Islamic government have fallen by the wayside. According to United Nations drug-control analysts, poppy plantations that had been abolished on religious grounds are under renewed cultivation.

Of particular concern is a surge of drug-growing in the former heroin strongholds of Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, experts say. The trend worries global law-enforcement organizations because of Afghanistan's appalling track record: Until 1999, the year before the Taliban decreed a ban on drug growing, Afghanistan was exporting more heroin than any other nation--some 5,000 tons annually, or 75 percent of the world's supply.

We clearly face major new challenges in Afghanistan, said Bernard Frahi, a UN drug-control expert who traveled to Kabul last month to hurriedly consult with the new leadership. But we have been promised complete cooperation.

Yet, just as clearly, the UN and other drug fighters have their work cut out for them in the lawless fields of Afghanistan. Taliban profited

The UN's own research shows that many of the Northern Alliance commanders who dominate the interim government have long histories of growing poppies. And the deeply entrenched roots of the trade, whose immense profits in a poor land even corrupted the ultra-pious Taliban, are nowhere more evident than in hard-bitten villages such as Sorukh Road, which means red river.

The Taliban were very hard, said Abdul Wakil, 23, a farmer who has started planting small plots of his land openly with poppies. They threw us in jail and they shaved the heads of our tribal leaders if they caught us growing.

But they were dealing in it too. They bought and resold the refined opium.

Like other villagers, he accused a senior Taliban official in the nearby city of Jalalabad of running a heroin-processing lab out of his car repair garage. An opium dealer in the town's bazaar, speaking on condition of anonymity, added that Taliban authorities often looked the other way when he resold villagers' stockpiled opium gum in neighboring Pakistan.

The allegations support recent U.S. State Department reports that the fundamentalist regime may have been earning as much as $50 million a year by quietly skimming drug profits--an essential source of cash for buying weapons to fight the Northern Alliance.

Still, even American drug-enforcement officials admit that the Taliban's ban on opium cultivation, imposed by supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in July 2000, was remarkably successful.

According to the UN International Drug Control Program, heroin exports from Afghanistan had plummeted 90 percent by October.

Yet why that drug-free status is fading fast is obvious in the mud-walled villages and cracked fields around Jalalabad.

Besides the irresistible economics of the drug trade--a pound of wheat earns a local farmer 3 cents while a pound of raw opium brings in at least $15--nature and war have conspired against growing legitimate crops.

I have a big field where I can grow lots of wheat or cotton, but I have no water, Shukrudeen, a local farmer, said of the region's brutal drought.

So what should I do with my few drops of irrigation water? said Shukrudeen, who has only one name. Grow a small bag of vegetables? Or a small bag of opium?

He decided to finally give up growing food a month ago, he said, after trying to sell his cauliflower crop in a nearby village. Impoverished by years of war, the residents couldn't afford his produce. So he gave it away. Now he is planting drugs for export.

Before the Taliban decree, most of Afghanistan's opium and heroin was smuggled to addicts in Pakistan, Iran and Russia, say trafficking experts. Roughly half ended up on the European market. Some 20 percent of the U.S. heroin supply was believed to come from Afghanistan. New crops already growing

More appears to be headed that way via dirt-poor villages such as Sorukh Road, which is only 6 miles outside Jalalabad, the eastern administrative center of the new government.

In plain view, hundreds of new poppy fields on the city's outskirts are fuzzed with green shoots that will be ready for harvest come springtime. Farmer Batin Shah, who gave his age as 80 or more, hoped Afghanistan's new leaders would clamp down on the trade before it spiraled out of control.

In our religion, growing poppies is sinful, the white-bearded Shah said during a break from hoeing his wheat field. The government needs to tell this to the people instead of just letting them do it.