Afghanistan (28 page)

In areas such as Pakistan’s FATA and Afghanistan’s Kumar valley and Nuristan, Afghan and Pakistani insurgents alike have continued the practice of making extractive use of natural resources, especially clear-cutting forests, to feed the timber mafia in Pakistan. Some of the Afghan timber-cutting groups have been recruited, mainly by HiH, to join the insurgents when Afghan government action ended their lumber trade in the Kunar valley and Nuristan by 2008, with the unemployed Afghans
and Pakistanis alike being paid to fight US forces. The cross-border ethnic Pushtun transport mafia that controls much of Pakistan’s long-distance trucking was also a long-standing ally of the pre-2001 Taliban and had links with the ISI and other Pakistani security services. While gem mining and trafficking is a relatively small percentage of the overall income, it has been carried out since the 1980s. It has now spread to Pakistan from Afghanistan as a source of insurgent funding. The TNSM took over gem mines in Swat in 2009.

Insurgents also seek to extract money from all other aspects of daily life in Afghanistan. Cell phone companies have had their towers and facilities threatened by insurgents who demand they pay protection money. The Afghan insurgents have embraced kidnapping as a major part of their tactics of intimidation. Criminal gangs have been known to “sell” wealthy or well-connected Afghan kidnap victims up the chain to insurgent or terrorist groups to whom they may be of value as a hostage, contributing to the increased crime that undercut Afghan security in 2008–10.
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“Greed and grievance” is a powerful force for instability in Afghanistan.
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Experiences with other insurgencies have shown that the most enduring insurgent groups are those that have access to an independent source of contraband funding.
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This also leads to conflicts over the source of such unaccountable resources.
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Narcotics cultivation and trafficking is the most significant such resource in Afghanistan.

CHAPTER SIX

“
If we do not eliminate drugs, drugs will eliminate us.”

—Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, 2006

T
he global implications of narcotics cultivation are enormous. The country produced over 98 percent of the world’s illegal opium in 2008–09. Narcotics trafficking is the Vortex’s third facet of international conflict, one that may indeed have the largest global reach.

Narcotics cultivation has greatly increased in Afghanistan since 2001.
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It has been intense in key provinces in the south. The area north of the Hindu Kush has been relatively quiet. There have been reductions in what, in the 1980s and 90s, were areas of opium cultivation, such as the plains north of Mazar-e-Sharif and Badakhshan. The UN estimated that the 2007–08 growing season produced some 8,200 tons of raw opium. Poppy cultivation in 2007–08 increased in overall yield even while the area cultivated declined 19 percent. In 2009, opium prices reached a ten-year low and more was being seized; poppy cultivation dropped by 22 percent and opium production by ten percent.
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Faced with falling world prices, in 2009 it was estimated that the Afghan insurgents have a stockpile of some 10,000 tons of raw opium that they are holding to manipulate market prices.
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Prices
per kilogram of opium declined by up to a third from 2008 to 2009 and have continued to decline further in 2009–10. Yet 14 provinces in Afghanistan have no eradication program at all. In 2008, with the target goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares of land from poppy production, only 5,480 hectares were eradicated and in the southern province of Helmand, where the area used for poppy cultivation has tripled since 2006.
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Opium and refined narcotics from Afghanistan are distributed throughout diverse regional markets in Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, and to Iran and Pakistan and throughout the end-markets in Europe, America, and Asia. Heroin from South Asia has taken up an increasing share of the market in North America.
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Years of Afghanistan’s foreign supporters enabling the Kabul government’s efforts increased the number of drug-free provinces in Afghanistan from six in 2006 to 18 in 2008. Yet the Afghans and their foreign supporters still have a long way to go when it comes to dealing with narcotics. In 2008–09 close to 98 percent of the remaining cultivation had been concentrated in seven provinces where the insurgency is strong: Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Daikundi, Zabul, Farah, and Nimruz.
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Opium requires instability and lawlessness for its cultivation as much as it needs labor to tend it and minimal levels of fertility and rainfall. Without these conditions, neither growers nor traffickers will make investments in both cultivation and infrastructure that assume they will make money before any outside force will take action to close them down.

Many of the tactics aimed to defeat narcotics have the potential to help spread the insurgency. By effectively chasing opium production into those provinces where the insurgency is strong, the insurgents secured a powerful revenue stream to support their operations. But outside these provinces, narcotics are still trafficked; this has powered the culture of corruption throughout Afghanistan, including the opium-free provinces. Even “opium-free” provinces play a role in Afghanistan’s narcotics.
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Cannabis and hashish cultivation goes on in these provinces, replacing opium in many cases; in some opium-free northern provinces, the cannabis crop is reportedly yielding a higher cash return per hectare under cultivation than did opium a few years ago.
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The Origins of the Threat

The initial rise of opium cultivation in Afghanistan followed a US-urged campaign of suppression in Pakistan in the late 1980s. Much of the cultivation was chased over the border into Afghanistan. There was already some opium cultivation in Afghanistan, but it was largely low-intensity and small in scale. During the anti-Soviet conflict, Helmand province was one of the first areas where pro-Soviet Afghan Communists and Islamic resistance leaders, both committed to ideologies that were anti-narcotics, alike realized that the income from poppy cultivation could be vital in buying local loyalties. As so often occurred in subsequent years, ideological concerns yielded to the need for income. In the 1980s, Ismailis in Badakhshan were cultivating narcotics and, unlike other Afghans, actually using some themselves. While narcotics use among Afghans was initially rare, it expanded during the decades of war until it reached a crisis level in 2008–10.

In the late 1980s, new varieties of opium poppy and fertilizers were introduced to Afghanistan by following trans-border trading “mafias,” mainly ethnic Pushtuns with ties throughout Pakistan, especially in the FATA and Karachi, who were making inroads across the border in Afghanistan. Once the number of Afghans with opium-growing skills reached “critical mass,” cultivation spread.

The rise of the Taliban followed the initial rise of narcotics cultivation in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Dissatisfaction with the increase in narcotics cultivation that had taken place in southern Afghanistan in 1992–94 helped fuel the Taliban’s initial success in that area. The Afghan Taliban was originally opposed to narcotics cultivation. Their initial anti-opium positions reflected the widespread grassroots Afghan suspicion of opium as potentially falling under the Koran’s prohibition of intoxicants like alcohol.

Yet soon after they had consolidated their hold on southern Afghanistan, the Taliban embraced opium cultivation for its financial and political benefits. Narcotics growers and traffickers who largely share the Taliban’s Pushtun ethnicity joined “mafias” as part of a pro-Taliban coalition, sharing money and credit.
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In the heyday of Taliban support for opium, it became the cash crop of choice in many areas. Even non-farmers would
cultivate it for the chance of a quick profit, and in 1996–2000 the Taliban grew and exported 15 kilotons of opium.

The July 2000 Taliban prohibition called for a stop to opium cultivation, but not export, and was widely thought to be a move to increase market prices by creating artificial scarcity. Yet its primary effect was to deepen the debt by farmers to opium traffickers who had paid them in advance for their crops and so to further the trafficker’s hold on the local population in the areas of most intense cultivation. Because of this prohibition, the price of raw opium rose some one thousand percent. Exports from existing stockpiles continued, gaining additional income for the traffickers but not for the local cultivators. Mullah Omar personally rescinded the ban after 9/11 in an attempt to rally wavering grassroots Afghan support, but his regime’s attempt to manipulate prices proved to be one of the many actions that undercut its support even among its supporters.

The post-2001 Afghanistan government in Kabul, however, has not wavered from its commitment to make narcotics cultivation and trafficking illegal. Not only Afghan law but traditional justice systems do not accept the claims by cultivators and traffickers that either poverty or the desire to extract revenge on the infidel occupiers justify cultivation of a substance considered prohibited by international standards and the Koran alike. Yet the fact remains that one of the most important reasons for the rise of narcotics cultivation in many areas of Afghanistan after 2001 was the lack of alternatives, which Kabul and its foreign supporters have found providing problematic. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), some 98 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy cultivators would be willing to turn to another crop if it provided as much as half as much as they earned from their current crop.
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The reason why opium cultivation has become concentrated in seven southern provinces with a strong insurgent presence is that this makes presenting alternatives impossible, and so the cultivation continues.

The Nature of the Threat

As with most activities in Afghanistan, it is difficult to generalize about narcotics cultivation and trafficking, which has historically varied greatly between and even within provinces.
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In parts of Afghanistan, even the
good guys grow poppy. In places such as Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the cultivation is so widespread and ingrained in the local economy that no major landowner or local official can avoid dealing with cultivation. If there was no cultivation, there would be few viable alternative sources for income or services in much of those war-torn areas. The strength of the insurgency in those areas means that Kabul and its supporters are in no position to offer an alternative to the crop that provides insurgents with much financial support.

“The Taliban and other groups are not running the drug trade but work in service of it,” in the words of Gretchen Peters.
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All of the terrorist and insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan are involved to a greater or lesser extent in narcotics. The Afghan Taliban is the largest single Afghan group involved in narcotics, but Haqqani and HiH are also known to be involved. In some areas, insurgents are participants in the narcotics-based violence. Elsewhere, traffickers have their own armed men. In 2005–06, HiH was widely believed to have murdered crop substitution aid workers in Helmand.
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Other groups involved are basically criminals that have adopted Islamic names and alliances as a matter of convenience. As with everything else in Afghanistan, there is no central command and there is extensive, often violent, competition between groups, with many Afghans trying to call in Afghan security forces or coalition airstrikes on rivals to give them a greater market share. Many insurgent commanders that have been killed or captured were targeted in this way, indicating the tensions between different insurgent groups and terrorists and insurgents and the traffickers.

Afghan groups appear to have control over the opium traffic within the borders of Afghanistan. Afghan insurgents offer protection for growers and opposition to counter-narcotics efforts in exchange for funding. They seek to use the traditional Afghan approach to patronage relations to create a culture of dependency. Since 2005–06 more and more laboratories and refineries dedicated to opium have moved in to take advantage of the insurgency. After the 2007 increase in the crop, large-scale stockpiling of opium by traffickers appears to be taking place, to prevent flooding the market and as insurance against the time when Afghanistan may not be able to produce, if the counter-narcotics efforts can be
extended throughout the country.
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By 2008–09, the insurgency was taking a more hands-on role in this process, as the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups are now being reported as running their own laboratories and providing protection and transportation for those laboratories run by outside traffickers, who pay for this service.
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Since cultivation of the poppies from which opium is extracted attracts less money than those actions higher up the value-added chain such as refining or sales, the traffickers set the farmgate price so that they usually pay the Afghan farmers only a little more than they would get with a legal crop, usually wheat. This means that if a farmer or laborer can earn four dollars a day or more from a legal crop, the appeal of opium will be undercut.
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Yet there is in many areas none of the infrastructure necessary for legal commodities to succeed in the global market the way Afghanistan’s poppies have done.

The opium traffickers have, in many cases, created the only thing resembling a social support network in much of southern Afghanistan. Narcotics traffickers also provide other vital services for their farmer clients, including providing credit. Others provide capital equipment or maintain services, including health clinics in some areas. Since the economy of rural Afghanistan has traditionally run on credit and, with the population largely too high in debt by 2001 to borrow further, this has been an area where crop substitution programs were often not adequate, giving narcotics traffickers an additional hold over the cultivators. After years of drought, warfare, and the impact of the Taliban, rural Afghanistan faced a total lack of new credit. There was no one willing or able to extend credit. Traditional sources of credit—kinship and patronage—were almost at maximum capacity, leaving many Afghan farmers desperate.