cannabisnews.com: Afghan Ban on Growing of Opium Is Unraveling





Afghan Ban on Growing of Opium Is Unraveling
Posted by FoM on October 22, 2001 at 07:51:15 PT
By Tim Golden
Source: New York Times
A highly successful government ban on the growing of opium poppies in Afghanistan, which had been by far the biggest source of opium in the world, has begun to unravel as the United States presses its war against the ruling Taliban, American and United Nations officials say.Reports from Afghanistan received last week by the United Nations show that farmers are planting or preparing to plant opium poppies in at least two important growing areas. Recent American intelligence reports also suggest that the year-old ban may be eroding as the military assault continues, United States officials said.
"They may have told people they can plant, they may tell people nothing and allow them to plant, or there may be enough chaos with the war that it won't matter what the Taliban says," said the State Department's senior official for international narcotics issues, R. Rand Beers. "We had a situation that showed promise that is now headed in absolutely the wrong direction."Even a wholesale collapse of the ban might not have an immediate impact on the availability and price of opium and heroin, one of its derivatives, in illegal drug markets around the world.A continued flow of opium from stockpiles inside Afghanistan has so far kept the prices of those drugs stable in Europe, and officials expect those reserves to last for perhaps another year.But after paying relatively little attention to the problem in recent years, American officials are now closely focused on Afghanistan's drug trade, saying that taxes on farmers and traders have become a crucial source of revenue for the Taliban and that drug money may be used to finance terrorist activities. "The urgency has increased," the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Asa Hutchinson, said in an interview.The challenge that Washington now faces is, in some part, of its own making. In the 1980's opium production flourished in Afghanistan with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. In the 1990's, as the country's poppy fields expanded, the United States refused to deal with the Taliban government and focused its drug control efforts in other regions that were thought to be supplying greater amounts of drugs to American markets."It's something that just wasn't on our radar screen," a senior American official said of Afghanistan's drug trade. "That heroin wasn't coming this way — it was mostly going to Europe. We were worried about other things going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't want to deal with the Taliban."While some officials suggest that American military forces might now try to target caches of opium stored around Afghanistan, others acknowledge privately that they have scant information about where those caches might be. More broadly, American officials admit that they have poor intelligence about the makeup and operations of Afghanistan's drug trafficking organizations and know even less about how those groups might be linked to Osama bin Laden or other suspected terrorists.Although opium has been produced in Afghanistan for centuries, it began to boom after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Often, officials said, the convoys of donkeys and trucks that smuggled arms to the mujahedeen returned to Pakistan with raw opium, sometimes with the assent of the Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.From there the drug was usually converted to morphine base or smuggled to Turkey to be refined into heroin.When the Pakistani government began cracking down on the trade in the 1990's, some opium farmers and traffickers whose tribes straddled the border simply moved their operations into Afghanistan. By the early 1990's Afghanistan was starting to approach the opium output of Myanmar, the world's largest producer. As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan in the mid-1990's, American officials hoped initially that they would be allies in the drug fight because intoxicants are condemned by Islam. But that did not happen, in part because opium was such a good cash crop."At first we though they would be good for our purposes because they were so strict," said a drug enforcement official who dealt with Afghanistan during the first years of the Taliban's Islamic rule and spoke on condition of anonymity. "But the problem just grew, because it was such a good cash crop and they were in such dire straits economically."For its own part, the Drug Enforcement Administration was shifting some of its resources away from the region. In 1997 a study by the agency found that although Afghanistan and Pakistan were still the source of about 20 percent of the heroin seized in East Coast cities, nearly three-fourths of the market there was being supplied by Colombia and Mexico. The next year, with the dangers to American drug agents rising, the agency decided to close two of its four offices in Pakistan."We decided we didn't care about Afghanistan, because it didn't affect the shores of the United States," a senior American official said. "We were wrong."In 1997 the Taliban pledged a one- third reduction in poppy cultivation and pleaded for development aid to the affected farmers. But the ban was not enforced, and very little foreign aid was forthcoming. The United States and European governments were appalled by the Taliban's human rights record, and drugs were a second-tier interest.The United Nations drug control program used modest development projects to reduce poppy cultivation in a few small areas of Afghanistan, and the United States contributed $3.2 million to the effort over five years. By comparison, it spent $4.2 million this year in Laos, the world's third-largest opium producer, and will spend $399 million next year to fight drug trafficking in Colombia.American officials had ample reason to be skeptical. In 1997 the poppy fields stretched over 144,345 acres, a United Nations survey found.Two years later the figure was 224,819 acres.The trade was a vital source of revenue for the impoverished Taliban government. Local Taliban officials took a 10 percent tax from poppy growers, as they did from other farmers, and an Islamic tax of as much as 20 percent on opium traders and transporters. Some warlords aligned with the opposition Northern Alliance were also deeply involved in the trade, United States officials said.In 1998 and 1999, United States intelligence data also revealed that larger laboratories for refining opium into morphine base and heroin were popping up in areas where they could exist only with the Taliban's assent, several American officials said. As the opium output rose, Afghanistan was processing more of its own heroin to supply newer markets in Eastern Europe and Russia, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia.When the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, decreed a complete ban on poppy growing in July 2000, few foreign drug officials expected any results. That year, according to C.I.A. estimates, the country's opium output surged to 4,042 tons, accounting for about 70 percent of the opium produced in the world. United Nations figures were slightly lower.But within two months, officials discovered that the poppy ban had been astonishingly effective, cutting Afghanistan's production to 81.6 tons, most of it from poppies grown in the roughly 10 percent of the country under Northern Alliance control.Although opium prices soared inside Afghanistan — leading some foreign officials to suspect a Taliban ploy to increase their revenues — a steady flow of opium from stockpiles that are largely controlled by autonomous traffickers along the country's borders kept the availability of heroin high and the price low in Europe. Since last month there have been conflicting reports about whether the ban would stand. But on Friday, the head of the United Nations drug control program for the region, Bernard Frahi, said he had just received reports from Afghanistan that poppy fields had been prepared for planting in the southwestern province of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, and that planting had already begun in some parts of Nangarhar, another important poppy growing province. United States officials said intelligence reports indicated that Taliban officials in some areas had signaled an end to the ban."In a period of uncertainty, when farmers have lost two-thirds of their income by switching to wheat, when there are no alternative development programs, the farmers will grow opium," Mr. Frahi said in a telephone interview from Islamabad.Source: New York Times (NY)Author: Tim GoldenPublished: October 22, 2001Copyright: 2001 The New York Times CompanyContact: letters nytimes.comWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/Related Articles:History Repeats as U.S. Finds Unlikely Allieshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread11136.shtmlWar and Drugs - Another Powder Trail http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread11121.shtmlU.S. Expected to Target Afghanistan's Opium http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread11103.shtml 
Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help




Comment #2 posted by bruce42 on October 22, 2001 at 12:54:11 PT
Lack of common sense
I like your theory. It makes perfect sense. And yes, anyone who manages to maintain power over a proud people while at the same time treating them like dirt must be rather crafty. Wow, the same thing could be said for this country, I guess. Interesting. Anyway, I am rally not sure what to believe- that our government lacks even the simple common sense to comprehend how thier actions might affect future events, or that somehow this all part of some huge pass the buck cover up. "Oh crap, we screwed up guys. We gave that Tal-ee-ban some cash and guns and its comin back to bite us in the ass. We better find a way to cover this up!" Drugs and tons of negative propaganda seem to have erased our past deeds from the minds of the sheeple.I guess, as long as U.S. "interests" (oil or someone actually dares fight back) are being threatened, we need to bomb the "brown" out of some poor country. We consider ourselves to be the police of the world- and I would have to agree with that- of course we use our own police as the model for our foreign policy. It is all to easy to draw parallels between racial profiling, no knock raids, illegal search and seizure, and unecessary force and the policies our government engages in when dealing with other countries. 
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #1 posted by Sam Adams on October 22, 2001 at 10:01:41 PT
New American core value: being gullible
The opium is growing again? Boy, I thought we had 'em right where we wanted there for a while! Imagine, if this war hadn't come along, we would have stopped opium production for the first time in human history! Yep, after 5,000 years of continuous opium production and widespread availability of the drug despite the efforts of dozens of different governments and empires over the centuries, we had it licked! Ol' George W, Orrin Hatch & co. had finally figured it out!-Sarcasm off-Try this on for a hypothesis. Back in May, the Taliban knew there was going to be a huge strike against the US in the fall of 2001. Spring also happens to be the season when the opium is harvested - it's planted in fall and grown over the winter. So the Taliban said, look, the US has been badgering us over opium for 5 years. Let's give 'em what they want - a "ban", take the quick "humanitarian" cash payout, and drive up the prices by stockpiling for a few months. After the crisis, we sell off our stash, and tell the US to F-off just in time for fall planting season! Perfect.I sure hope that, behind all the demogogeury, our gov't realizes that the Taliban are extremely shrewd operators. They know exactly what they're doing, and there eyes are wide open to all the weaknesses of our gov't and society.I notice a few articles here and there in the media on the opium/Taliban issue, most featuring quotes from lower-level US gov't officials. I think the higher-ups are remaining silent on it and not making it a central propaganda issue because1) We've already been played for chumps by paying the Taliban $40 million in May
2) We can NEVER win the war against opium. The whole Use-the-military-in-the-drug-war issue isn't one that can stand up to the scrutiny that is currently focussed on the Afganistan/terrorism situation. It only works on a small-scale, back-door operation that doesn't attract much attention, like small Central American countries. Isn't that the REAL lesson learned by the US gov't in Viet Nam? Military boondoggles to go play in the jungle/desert with your toys are fine, but don't let it get to big or cause too many US casualties, or it blows up in your face. That's why Reagan switched to Central American backwaters and small-scale stuff.And, of course, actually using the military to fight for good vs. evil isn't even considered - like stopping 700,000 Rwandas from being chopped up, or the Kurds from being wiped out - who cares?
[ Post Comment ]


Post Comment