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Heroin, Drug Warlords Reappear on Afghan
Scene
By Peter Dale
Scott, Pacific News Service, Dec 17, 2001
http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/dec/1217warlords.html
Quick on the heels of Taliban defeat, starving farmers
are replanting the opium poppies banned under the Islamist regime, giving rise
to fears of renewed drug warlordism. Engaged in the shooting war, Washington may
be turning a blind eye to a favorite income source of its allies, says Pacific
News Service commentator Peter Dale Scott -- bad news for those who want to
reduce global heroin production. Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and
professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and has authored
numerous books on drugs and U.S. foreign policy.
Within two years, Afghanistan may again be producing 2,800
or more tons of opium annually, according to U.S. and Pakistani sources,
becoming again the world's chief supply source. In areas bordering Pakistan,
where most of the opium is processed, prices have already plummeted.
While the Taliban effectively forbade growing opium poppies -- the raw
material for heroin -- their defeat means starving farmers are hurrying to
replant the one lucrative crop available to them.
This is of course bad
news for those striving to reduce the scourge of heroin in the world. It also
presents the risk of a return of warlordism to Afghanistan -- regional
commanders and armies financed by the opium in their area, jealously refusing to
relinquish such a lucrative income source to a central government. At risk is a
revival of the vicious internecine feuds that took so many civilian lives in the
1990s, after the Soviet withdrawal.
With planting and other drug
business already moving quickly on the ground, there has not yet been any
vigorous U.S. counteroffensive to finance the post-Taliban government from
healthier sources.
An October United Nations report confirmed that the
Taliban successfully eliminated opium production in Afghanistan with a ban in
2000 that was almost universally enforced. The feat was enormous: before the
ban, Afghanistan supplied 90 per cent of Europe's heroin. Then, Afghanistan
provided 3,276 tons of opium poppies, more than half the world's output. This
year's post-ban crop, however, was a small 185 tons, over 90 percent of it from
provinces under the control of America's allies the Northern Alliance.
Those skeptical about Mullah Omar's motives for the ban speculated that
the Taliban held substantial reserves of processed opium and wished to drive up
prices. The same sources predicted that a dumping of Taliban opium into the
world market would follow the U.S. attack. This did not happen.
Indeed,
the U.N. report noted that the dramatic reduction in Afghan opium production was
not offset by increases in other countries. The stage was set for the biggest
blow to global heroin trafficking since the Communist crackdown in China after
World War II.
However, what would have been the world's largest
curtailment of opium production in half a century will now apparently be
reversed. As the Taliban was driven or fled from province after province,
reports indicated farmers were replanting wheat fields with opium poppies.
Another dark indicator of a coming boom is the recent and unexpected
release from a Pakistani jail of Ayub Afridi, once the Khyber Pass kingpin for a
network of Pashtun drug warlords in Nangarhar Province. Some have interpreted
his release as a boost to his former contacts such as Haji Abdul Qadir, Haji
Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali, who, according to the Asia Times Daily in Hong
Kong, used to be the biggest heroin and opium mafia in Afghanistan's Pashtun
belt.
Haji Abdul Qadir is now the political leader in Nangarhar
Province, west of Khyber Pass, while Hazrat Ali and Haji Mohammed Zaman are
leading the Afghan ground attack against the al Qaeda holdouts in the nearby
Tora Bora caves.
The lack of U.S. comment and nearly invisible reporting
on these developments are ominous signs that Washington may turn a blind eye as
its former proteges and current allies finance themselves once again with drug
traffic.
Yet another sign is active disinformation by officials of the
Bush administration.
The Taliban's drastic ongoing reduction in opium
cultivation was ignored, and indeed misrepresented, by CIA Director George Tenet
in his February report to Congress, in a speech that threatened retaliatory
strikes against the Taliban. "Production in Afghanistan has been exploding,
accounting for 72 percent of illicit global opium production in 2000," Tenet
said. He added that "The Taliban regime in Afghanistan... encourages and profits
from the drug trade."
This was two months after the first indications on
the ground that the Taliban interdict was being enforced.
In the l980s,
U.S. officials ignored heroin trafficking in Afghanistan by its allies, the
mujahideen. As we move into 2002, it appears that situation is being recreated.
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