What is the role of drugs/heroin in Afghanistan conflict?

The Taliban government's highly effective year-old ban on growing opium poppies is a casualty of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. U.S. and United Nations officials report that Afghan farmers are planting or preparing to plant poppies instead of wheat or corn in formerly Taliban-controlled areas. War, poverty, and a four-year old drought make poppies Afghanistan's most profitable cash crop: Afghan farmers say they will get $100 or more per pound of opium paste, compared with less than $1 per pound for fruits and vegetables. It is estimated that, barring unforeseen circumstances, Afghanistan will, within one or two years, again become the world's leading producer of opium.

Until 2000, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, the poppy product that is refined into heroin. In July 2000, the Taliban, citing Islamic principles, issued an edict outlawing poppy cultivation and imprisoned farmers who defied the ban. Afghanistan's production of raw opium fell by 96%, from over a million pounds in 1999 to just 40,600 pounds before September 11, according to the United Nations Drug Control Program. Opium stockpiles inside Afghanistan, however, remained.

Drug control experts estimate that before the ban, the Taliban had made $10 to $50 million from taxing poppy farmers, helping to distill the raw product into heroin, and sharing in the trafficking profits. After the ban, most of the poppy cultivation and trafficking in Afghanistan was in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance--the U.S.-backed rebel group that, by early December, had seized control of Kabul and most of the rest of the country. U.S. officials have repeatedly charged that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network has also been partly financed by drug trafficking, but no firm evidence has yet been made public.

The U.S. has a history of turning a blind eye to the drug trade when its strategic partners are involved. In the 1980s, the U.S. knew that CIA-backed anti-Soviet mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan raised money for arms by selling opium. At the end of Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in 1989, 60% of heroin in the U.S. originated in Afghanistan. Beginning in the 1990s, most heroin entering the United Nations has come from Colombia, where cultivation of poppies (along with coca leaves for cocaine) has soared.

The Taliban's efforts to ban poppy cultivation, however, was as much about self-interest as Islamic Puritanism. Not only did Afghanistan receive some modest U.S. antinarcotics assistance and a small channel for diplomacy with Washington, but the Taliban also behaved as any cartel might. Faced with bumper crops of poppy in recent years, Afghan farmers had glutted the market causing wholesale opium prices to fall to $44/kilo. Afghanis began to warehouse opium for future selling in a better market. A year after the ban, opium prices shot up as the Taliban and Afghan farmers controlled the flow from warehouses. Just before September 11, 2001, the same kilo could fetch up to $700.

With the start of U.S. air strikes, those who had stored opium in Afghanistan began dumping it on the market. Pakistani counter-narcotics officials report that drug barons are selling large quantities of heroin in Pakistan, causing the price to decline sharply. Normally, Afghan poppies and heroin are smuggled out through Pakistan and Iran, from where much goes to Europe and North America, but since the start of the war, clandestine routes have expanded into Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries north of Afghanistan. Militarily officials report that the drugs are being moved in large quantities by armed groups.

U.S. counter-narcotics agencies are exploring ways to prevent a surge in opium cultivation, including subsidies on legal crops and tying international aid and recognition to the new Afghan government's rejection of opium. Afghan farmers interviewed by western reporters say they are willing to give up poppy growing and they challenge the United States to create viable alternatives. "Help us establish industries in Afghanistan," Abdul Wakil, a 54-year old farmer with ten children, told the New York Times. "We are tough people, and workers, and we would happily quit the cultivation of poppy. But here there are no industries, no factories, nothing, and we need to take the money from the one remaining source." The real problem, U.S. officials concede, will be persuading those likely to govern a post-Taliban Afghanistan to fight opium production and trafficking, when these groups have shown little inclination to do so in the past.

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