Opium jihad

‘We should not
destroy opium
fields before
alternatives are in
place,’ says Mohammed Ibrahim
with an angry voice. ‘Instead we
should assist the poor farmers.’
Ibrahim works for Afghan Aid in
Badakhshan province in
northeastern Afghanistan, an
isolated mountainous region that
has been one of the country’s
primary opium cultivating areas.
In 2006 total opium production
in Afghanistan was estimated at
some 6,000 tons, more than 90
per cent of world production. The
Afghan government has been put
under huge international pressure
to come up with quick solutions
to bring these figures down.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai
has announced a ‘jihad against
opium’, and has implemented
repressive polices, including the
eradication of opium fields. This
has caused great anger among
farmers.

No other option

‘The main reason farmers grow
opium is the bad economic
situation,’ says Ibrahim.
Badakhshan has a high population
density, and most farmers own
insufficient land to meet their
needs. ‘There are also not
enough jobs,’ he continues, ‘and
many families have to send
members to other provinces or
Pakistan and Iran to get enough
income.’

Ibrahim brings us to Argu
district to talk with opium
farmers. ‘Our main problems are
lack of water and the drought,’
says an old farmer with a long
grey beard and a white turban.
‘My land depends on rain, and
does not produce enough to feed
my family,’ explains another
farmer. ‘Now we solve our food
shortage with growing opium.’

The eldest farmer in the group
agrees: ‘Destroying our opium
fields leaves us with no other
options. Instead we want the
government to come and talk
with us how to solve the
problem. Now all they do is
destroy our harvest.’

We meet with provincial
governor Munshi Abdul Majid,
seated behind his large desk
flanked by huge baskets of plastic
flowers. President Karzai has
made governors responsible for
reducing opium cultivation in their
provinces. ‘This year I will bring
down opium production here by
40 per cent,’ says Munshi.

In reality, the power of local
governors is limited, and they
often have to negotiate
eradication, in order to ‘spread
the pain’ equally over different
districts and tribes. Corruption
can also play a role, with farmers
complaining that some local
authorities are themselves
involved in the opium trade.

‘I feel pity for the people,’ says
the governor. ‘I put tremendous
pressure on them to stop poppy
cultivation, but I come with
empty hands.’ The governor faces
a difficult dilemma. If his actions
are too harsh, it may upset the
delicate power balance in the
province. But if he does not do
enough the central government
will send the US-trained Afghan
Eradication Force (AEF) to his
province. Last year this
immediately resulted in conflict
and several deaths, which he
now wants to prevent at all costs.

PEP-talk

In theory, eradication is only
taking place in so-called target
areas, where farmers have
access to other means of making
a living. The British have
produced socio-economic maps
delineating areas deemed to be
eligible for eradication. We are
invited to join an eradication
mission in Baharak district with
the provincial Poppy Elimination
Programme (PEP) team. These
teams are set up to assist the
governors.

When we arrive a tractor is
already ploughing up a field with
30-centimetre high opium plants
close to the road. The owner of
the field looks bewildered.

‘I borrowed $500 to pay for
labour and fertiliser for this field,’
he explains. ‘Now I have no idea
how I can repay this debt. And it
is too late in the season to grow
something else.’

In practice, it seems the
targeting policy is not being
implemented. Sue Jordan, the US
advisor to the PEP team, has
never even seen the eradication
area maps. ‘We should not just
eradicate the opium fields, but
follow it up with development
programmes,’ she says. ‘There is
a causal relationship between
poverty and the need to feed
your family and opium cultivation.
These are the people that are
being hit by eradication, not the
rich farmers or the traders.’

Nangarhar’s ‘success story’

We drive east into Nangarhar
province, following the main trade
route with Pakistan. Nangarhar
has been the one big success
story of drug control in
Afghanistan, supposedly proving
that ‘it can be done’. Promises of
large-scale development
assistance convinced local
authorities and village elders to
support an opium ban and make
the province opium-free.

Poppy cultivation did fall from
28,000 hectares in 2004 to just
1,000 in 2005. But the economy
plummeted and farmers were
caught in a debt-trap.

Then, in March, on this road
towards the Pakistan border, US
troops caused a massacre that is
vividly remembered by everyone
we meet. In panic after a suicide
bomber attacked their convoy, the
US Marines shot at everything
that moved, killing at least 16
people and wounding dozens
more. The atmosphere is still
tense, now even more so
because ongoing poppy
eradication has increased hostility
towards foreigners.

On both sides of the road we
see blooming poppy fields; we
park the car near a large field
where farmers are harvesting.
The friendly owners walk us
through their beautiful pink-white
sea of flowers. Here and there
the petals have fallen off and
people are lancing the pods to
make the sap drip out. Tomorrow
morning the raw opium will be
scraped off.

‘Last year we grew wheat
here,’ says one of the farmers,
‘but I have six sons and three
daughters all going to school and
this is the only way I can pay for
their education.’ Rain has been
good this year, so he is hopeful of
a record harvest.

The PEP team in Jalalabad
confirms that opium production is
increasing again. ‘At first when
the stranglehold of the ban
started to loosen, farmers were
still careful,’ according to the
American advisor. ‘This year we
see the full-blown response to
the loss of livelihoods: poppy
everywhere.’

In response the US had
everything prepared to start
chemical spraying; even the
leaflets were printed. Its
frustration was huge when the
Karzai government maintained its
opposition to the use of
herbicides for poppy eradication.
The Nangarhar governor tries to
keep a balance between
eradication and stability after
shoot-outs and riots broke out in
several districts. Tractors were
burned, roads blocked and several
people got killed. He made clear
the AEF was not welcome in his
province.

Rose island, poppy ocean

At the foot of the Spinghar
mountains, right on the Pakistan
border, we visit a village in Achin
district notorious for being a
centre of the opium trade. ‘Don’t
go there,’ everybody had warned
us. The situation is quite
explosive because of Taliban
groups crossing the mountains
and because of the fear of
eradication so close to harvest
time. At a local roses distillery –
built with German funds to
provide an alternative to poppy
production – we meet a local
who is willing to take us along as
his personal guests.

Nearing the mountain ridge,
the poppy fields get bigger and
bigger until we stand in the midst
of an ocean of white poppies
stretching to the horizon in every
direction. On the edges of the
fields we also see familiar fingershaped
leaves: during summer
these same fields are a forest of
cannabis. In the midst of the
poppy ocean we find one small
island planted with roses,
symbolic of the scale of
‘alternative development’.

We spend hours in the village
drinking tea and talking about the
local drugs economy, price trends
and yield expectations. A local
trader shows us his sack of dried
opium from last year. He breaks
open a piece to have us smell
and taste it. ‘I make about 20 per
cent profit by buying raw opium
from the villagers and selling it to
the ones with heroin laboratories
up in the mountains,’ he explains.

Some of the villagers sitting
around us work in such a
laboratory and explain the
process: ‘Seven kilos of opium
can be processed into one kilo of
morphine-base, and to transform
that into one kilo of heroin you
need about the same amount of
acid.’ The price of the acid has
increased enormously due to
drug control efforts, and now
surpasses the price of opium per
kilo. The end product from these
mountains is ‘brown sugar’, the
heroin type dominant on the
European market. After lunch,
someone shows us a kilo of pure
brown heroin, worth $2,300 here
and about 20 times more on the
European market.

Flowery future

From the outset we have
objected to claims that the opium
ban in Nangarhar was a ‘success’,
given its dramatic consequences
for farmers, share-croppers, day
labourers and the population at
large. When drug control
agencies issued jubilant press
releases heralding a 96 per cent
drop in poppy cultivation in the
province, they neglected to
mention the humanitarian drama
this helped to trigger.

The beautiful flowery views of
today confirm that the reduction
of the opium economy in
Nangarhar was unsustainable and
cannot be seen as a model for
the rest of Afghanistan. Yet policy
makers continue to search for
illusory quick solutions.
Eradication has been stepped up
significantly this year – 22,000
hectares by the end of April and
rising. Yet opium production in
2007 is still likely to reach an alltime
record high, leading to
further pressure to apply more
aggressive policies next year.

Martin Jelsma and Tom Kramer are
researchers for the Transnational
Institute Drugs and Democracy
Programme, and co-authors of Losing
Ground: Drug Control and War in
Afghanistan(www.tni.org/drugs)