Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The 2004 harvest embarrassed Washington and London sufficiently for them to begin a more serious debate as to what to do. The United States wanted aerial spraying to eradicate the crop as it was already doing in Colombia. Britain and the Afghan government were adamantly opposed, fearing it would damage other crops and livestock and drive angry farmers into the hands of the Taliban. They proposed ground eradication, which was slow and cumbersome but more discriminatory. Robert Charles, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL, insisted that spraying was the only answer. Charles upped the ante in Washington when he demanded that U.S. forces get involved in both interdiction and eradication, but Rumsfeld refused. “We could have destroyed all the [heroin] labs and warehouses in the three primary provinces—Helmand, Nangarhar, and Kandahar—in a week,” Charles said later.

  Robert Charles rightly predicted that failure in 2004 would worsen the insurgency and force the United States to send in more troops. He was the first senior U.S. official to admit publicly that drug profits were funding the Taliban. However, in January 2005, with the new secretary of state Condoleezza Rice offering no support and Karzai and Tony Blair opposed to his views, Charles resigned. The internal debate in Washington was irreparably weakened but continued for more than a year. The United States committed larger sums to counter narcotics, but there was no agreement on how to spend the money. Out of $780 million allocated by Washington in 2004, only $120 million was for alternative livelihoods—the most important ingredient in weaning farmers away from poppy cultivation.18 The opium crop was grown in only about 3 percent of the total arable land, so clearly farmers were growing other crops, and there was enormous potential for their improving yields and the incomes from them if aid was directed there. However, developing alternative crops and livelihoods was never a serious part of U.S. policy, and the debate circled around aerial or ground eradication.

  Some ground eradication did start but only made matters worse. Among the Pashtun tribes, any kind of eradication was considered unfair because the poor farmer would be hit first while the rich ones could bribe their way out of trouble. Ground eradication was used by powerful tribes and officials to weaken their rivals. Those tribes out of power were targeted first, and sought further protection from the Taliban. The danger with aerial eradication was that it would unite all the tribes against the government. Traffickers actually welcomed limited eradication because it would raise the price of opium, which had fallen from six hundred dollars to ninety dollars per kilo after three massive harvests. The United States refused to recognize that the problem was not drugs per se but drug money, which undermined state institutions, encouraged corruption, and helped fund the Taliban and al Qaeda. Farmers received only about 20 percent of the revenue from drugs, while traffickers received 80 percent. The export value of the opium crop rose from just under $1.0 billion in 2000 to $2.5 billion in 2002 and $3.1 billion in 2006.19 Only by targeting the major traffickers could drug money be stopped from reaching the extremists.

  Karzai and the Kabul government shared the blame for failing to tackle the major traffickers. The UN and all the major Western embassies gathered evidence that Karzai was tolerating suspected drug traffickers because they were either his political allies or close friends or because he could not afford their removal from power. There was enormous pressure on Karzai to remove Akhunzada as governor of Helmand, but Karzai refused to do so. Finally, in late 2005, just before British troops were due to be deployed in Helmand, Tony Blair gave Karzai an ultimatum: Britain would not deploy troops as long as Akhunzada remained in his post. Karzai succumbed but gave Akhunzada a seat in the Senate while keeping on his younger brother as deputy governor—a move that undermined the British deployment. In 2006, during the Taliban offensive, Karzai turned to Akhunzada again, putting him in charge of an auxiliary police force in the province, despite strong British objections.

  Another close friend of the Karzai family was Arif Nurzai, the minister for tribal affairs, whose sister was married to Karzai’s younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. Western embassies accused Nurzai of protecting traffickers, which he vehemently denied. Western pressure forced Karzai to remove him from the cabinet, but he was then elected to parliament and became deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament. New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall named several staunch Karzai allies, including Akhunzada and Nurzai, as widely believed to profit from the drug trade, and she quoted unnamed diplomatic sources as saying “there are even reports” that Ahmed Wali Karzai was also linked to the drug trade.20 Wali Karzai denied the charges, but the president was furious and ordered an investigation into Gall’s sources, which turned out to be a senior British diplomat whom the Afghan government briefly declared persona non grata.21

  Reports about Wali Karzai intensified in June 2006 after the American television network ABC quoted U.S. Army files purloined from the Bagram base describing how Wali Karzai had received money from drug lords. “They want to give my brother a bad name,” Wali Karzai retorted.22 The U.S. military said the report was outdated but did not reject its authority. Wali Karzai lived in Kandahar, where he represented his brother in managing the southern Pashtun tribes. He was criticized by many Pashtuns for allegedly favoring his own tribe and other tribes loyal to the Karzai family, while pushing away tribes who were not natural allies, forcing them to join the Taliban. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, Wali Karzai was elected head of the Kandahar provincial council, further enhancing his power in the south. Many of the former NA warlords—ministers and generals in the north—were also involved in drug trafficking.

  The Interior Ministry did not just fail to take down the warlords; it became a major protector of drug traffickers, and Karzai refused to clean it out. As warlord militias were demobilized and disarmed by the UN, commanders found new positions in the Interior Ministry and continued to provide protection to drug traffickers. Positions such as police chief in poppy-producing districts were auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the going rate reported to be one hundred thousand dollars for a six-month appointment to a position with a salary of just sixty dollars a month. The massive corruption within the police that was ignored by Germany, which was supposed to be training the force, was a major cause for public dissatisfaction and gave the Taliban further reason to mobilize public support. In 2004 the fragmented production of opium by thousands of dealers was consolidated under a smaller number of large dealers. By 2007, UNODC estimated that there were just twenty-five to thirty senior traffickers, each one running two hundred or more junior drug dealers, who in turn ran some five hundred local purchasers. Over 70 percent of the major traffickers were based in the south but none had been jailed.23

  Tribal loyalties, politics, and links to the Taliban or the government were closely mixed up and it was impossible to unravel one thread without unraveling the entire ball of string. There was also a blurring of lines by powerful figures who trafficked in drugs and those who protected traffickers. The determining factor was Karzai’s weakness and unwillingness to target major drug traffickers. I tackled him about this regularly, but he vehemently denied that anybody in his administration was involved in drugs, and if asked about particular individuals, he said they were needed for the time being or that there was no concrete evidence against them— which was often true. He repeated these arguments to Western donors, who found it more difficult to justify troops and aid to Afghanistan when the president was appointing drug dealers to top political posts. It was clear that improving the justice system, training police, or eradicating crops was meaningless unless the top traffickers were caught.

  In 2005, after several U.S. congressmen shamed the Pentagon for its inaction, the Pentagon and the CIA finally came around to publicly accepting that drug money was fueling terrorism. The United States, Britain, and the G8 group of nations approved a major counter-narcotics plan at a summit meeting in London in June 2005. Rumsfeld reluctantly agreed to provide airlift a
nd planning for five Afghan commando teams trained by U.S. and British Special Forces. However, he continued to drag his feet when it came to implementation. The Pentagon promised to embed DEA officials with U.S. troops and provide them helicopters to raid heroin labs, but the DEA officials in Afghanistan were ignored by the U.S. military. Under pressure, Rumsfeld had accepted that there was a problem but then made sure that the U.S. military was not involved in doing anything to solve it.

  The arrival of NATO forces in the south in 2006 made little difference. No NATO country mandated its troops to interdict drug convoys or catch traffickers. Despite the G8 plan, no practical help was offered by any country. “Afghanistan is teetering on becoming a narco-state,” admitted Gen. James Jones, the overall commander of NATO in Europe in May 2006. But in the same breath he added, “You will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields. This is not our mandate.”24 Only Antonio Costa, head of the UNODC, had the courage to call a spade a spade. “Unfortunately Afghanistan is addicted to its own opium,” said Costa. “Members of the local administration, police officials . . . and even politicians and members of parliament benefit from the trafficking.”25

  Opium production rose to a staggering 6,100 tons in 2006, the highest ever recorded, and to 8,200 tons the following year, when Afghanistan produced 93 percent of the world’s heroin. In 2006 cultivation rose in Helmand by 162 percent, and there was an increase of 77 percent in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. In 2006 the opium sector contributed nearly half, or 46 percent, of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, which was now estimated at $6.7 billion. There was no doubt that the Taliban’s major offensive in the summer of 2006 was due largely to the enormous income it now accrued from opium. “We are seeing a very strong connection between the increase in the insurgency on the one hand and the increase in cultivation on the other hand,” warned Costa.26

  In 2007 Helmand alone was responsible for 50 percent of the crop, or the equivalent of the total crop in 2005. Nevertheless, in 2007 thirteen provinces were declared drug-free, as the United States and UNODC had initiated a reward scheme in the shape of increased development funds for those governors and provinces that reduced production. The United States and European countries were now spending on average one billion dollars a year on counter-narcotics, but the effect in the south was still negligible.

  Drug money was everywhere. It played a major role in the 2005 parliamentary elections. In a study, Andrew Wilder, a prominent American researcher based in Kabul, concluded that at least seventeen elected members of parliament were drug traffickers, while twenty-four were connected to drug gangs.27 In Kabul, multistory glass and concrete shopping malls with the city’s first lifts and escalators came up, as traffickers laundered their money through the construction industry. Huge, gaudy multicolored homes—some designed to look like the White House, others straight out of Disneyland—sprang up in Kabul’s suburbs, looking uncomfortably in-congruent next to the hovels of the poor, where plastic sheets kept out the rain and snow. New four-by-four vehicles and diamond-studded guns and watches became de rigueur for traffickers. There was another unseen cost: more than 170,000 Afghans, including 30,000 women, were hooked on heroin, consuming 90 tons of opium a year by 2005, and there were only a handful of clinics dealing with addiction.28

  Drug money permeated the local government in every province, making it impossible to carry out the simplest development projects unless the drug lords cleared them first. Drug money paralyzed the building of a legal economy, as no industry, agriculture, or trade could compete with drug profits. People could not be persuaded to take ordinary jobs because the drug industry provided better salaries. Most significantly, drug money allowed the Taliban to pay and arm its troops, compensate the families of suicide bombers, and import new and better weapons while al Qaeda was able to reestablish training camps for international terrorists. In 2006 the State Department belatedly conceded that “Afghanistan’s huge drug trade severely impacts efforts to rebuild the economy, develop a strong democratic government based on the rule of law, and threatens regional stability.”29

  U.S. and NATO forces still failed to develop either a coherent interdiction or an eradication strategy. “Even now, the Bush administration is disproportionately concentrating on the most visible, but least effective approach, forcible crop eradication, which merely moves the problem around and enriches traffickers by raising the price of their opium holdings,” said The New York Times.30 In any effective counter-narcotics strategy, eradication had to follow rather than precede development and the creation of alternative livelihoods. A revival of agriculture had to take place across the board. This is what experts such as Barnett Rubin and I had argued to Andrew Natsios and USAID right after 9/11, and continued to argue to U.S. and NATO officials six years later—but to little avail.

  The Afghan drug trade is sucking in all its neighbors as well. Traffickers in Afghanistan’s six neighboring states are all involved in exporting opium, with the accompanying ills of local addiction and corruption. After 9/11, UNODC and the U.S. DEA put in place Operation Containment, a project involving twenty countries in the region, designed to prevent precursor chemicals from entering Afghanistan and drugs from leaving, but its success has been very limited. The five Central Asian republics provide a major gateway for Afghan opium to Russia and Europe. All five states are weak, undermined by dictatorship and underdevelopment, and heroin has become an important means for the small, corrupt ruling elites there to enrich themselves. Meanwhile, intravenous drug use in the region is fueling some of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS rates in the world.

  Afghan opium has helped destabilize Tajikistan, which shares a 750-mile border with Afghanistan and is still recovering from its bloody civil war in the early 1990s. It is one of the poorest countries in the world and provides an easy target for both traffickers and drug abuse. The twenty-thousand -strong force of Russian border guards who once guarded the Afghan frontier is gone, replaced by poorly trained Tajik conscripts who are easily corrupted by the traffickers. There are now more than seventy thousand addicts in a country of just six million people. In August 2004, Ghaffor Mirzoyev, who headed the country’s Drug Control Agency, was arrested with a stockpile of three thousand weapons, including antiaircraft missiles. He was later charged with tax evasion, abuse of power, murder, and trafficking.31

  Interpol investigators told me a year before 9/11 that they suspected leading politicians in Turkmenistan, including some in the office of President Saparmurat Niyazov, of being deeply involved in the drug trade. Turkmen dissidents in exile have made similar charges.32 In the late 1990s, I saw heroin being openly sold outside five-star hotels in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat. Turkmenistan’s easily accessible border with western Afghanistan, along stretches of flat open desert, allow drug convoys to enter that country. The Taliban had a close relationship with the Turkmen regime in the 1990s, and Taliban leaders continued to frequent Ashgabat even after 9 /11. Opium was also transiting through Uzbekistan, enriching many in the government, while Kyrgyzstan provided an outlet for drug shipments to Xinjiang province in China, where there was a huge increase in heroin addiction. Heroin addiction in Central Asia was estimated to have increased tenfold since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.33

  The drug surfeit was most apparent in Iran and Pakistan. Iran has the highest proportion of opium addicts in the world, with nearly 3 percent of the population over the age of fifteen addicted to heroin, according to the UN. Only Kyrgyzstan and Mauritius pass the 2 percent addiction mark. Nearly half of Iran’s 170,000 prisoners are held on drug-related charges. Yet Iran has rigorous antidrug surveillance on its border with Afghanistan, having spent more than $1 billion on fences, ditches, and minefields patrolled by thousands of Iranian troops. Since 1990, some 3,000 Iranian security officials have been killed in battles against smugglers.34

  The drug crisis in Pakistan is not much better. Pakistan was heroin free in 1979, but by 1986 there were 650,000 addicts, 3 million by 1992, and 5 million
by 2000. Drug money has fueled criminals and smugglers and has allowed ethnic, Islamic, and sectarian extremist groups to arm and fund themselves. The country became a major route for heroin exports from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the 1990s, a role that increased after 9/11, when the Taliban were based in Pakistan. “Pakistan is part of the massive Afghan opium producing/refining system,” the State Department said in 2006. Pakistani traffickers financed Afghan poppy farmers as well as al Qaeda and the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban while they, the traffickers, supplied opiates to Turkey, Iran, and Europe.35

  After 9/11, in 2002, opium growing started again in Pakistan, despite the country’s having been declared free of poppy cultivation in 2000. In 2002 poppy was being grown on sixteen thousand acres across the North-West Frontier Province. Afghanistan’s drug problem has now become a regionwide problem, fueling extremism and undermining governments.

  Drug money was to play a major role in Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. Just as there had been serious doubts about holding the presidential elections too soon, there were even greater doubts about holding the parliamentary elections so early in the regime’s life. The Taliban were resurgent, reconstruction had barely started, and there were insufficient foreign troops on the ground. Karzai was adamant that he wanted the elections held on time. Yet Karzai himself was to create major problems by delaying the resolution of vital issues—e.g., determining provincial and district boundaries, creating constituencies, and promulgating an electoral law— and by refusing to form a political party.