Opium is the Television of the Masses

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=584408
Afghanistan: a nation abandoned to drugs

Country produces 87% of global opium. One in ten Afghans works in opium trade. UN: state is world's second worst to live in

By Nick Meo in Jalalabad and Leonard Doyle

19 November 2004

Three years after the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations issued a dramatic plea for help yesterday, saying that Afghanistan's opium crop is flourishing as never before and the country is well on the way to becoming a corrupt narco-state.

The UN's annual opium survey reveals that poppy cultivation increased by two-thirds this year, a finding that will come as a deep embarrassment to Tony Blair, who pledged in 2001 to eradicate the scourge of opium along with the Taliban.

So alarmed is the UN that it is suggesting a remedy more radical than any that has been put forward before - bringing in US and British forces to fight a drugs war similar to the war on terror. It wants them to destroy farmers' crops on a massive scale before they can be harvested.

The report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODOC) says the narcotics trade is far bigger than anybody had realised. Most experts in Afghanistan believe it is a more significant factor in the continuing violence and instability than the Taliban insurgency.

On the eve of the Afghan war Mr Blair informed the Labour Party conference that "90 per cent of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan". Despite evidence from the UN that the Taliban was suppressing the drugs trade, Mr Blair said: "The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy."

There is growing evidence, however, that despite some improvements, Afghanistan has become a failed state. It is now ranked by the UN as the second worst country in the world to live in - after Sierra Leone.

British officials point out that the Afghan economy is booming, that three million refugees have returned home and that four million children are in schools. But yesterday's report reveals that the engine of economic growth is opium production. Last year Afghanistan exported 87 per cent of the world's supplies. Opium is now the "main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among previously quarrelsome peoples", according to the UN. Most of the opium is smuggled across the Pakistan border, where the Taliban and al- Qa'ida charge drug traffickers transit and protection fees.

The UN report for 2003 found that one in 10 Afghans - many of them unemployed returned refugees - is involved in the drugs trade which last year employed 2.3 million people, and made up 60 per cent of gross national product.

In just one year the area under cultivation increased by 64 per cent. Output was estimated at 4,200 tons, a 17 per cent increase on last year with only disease and bad weather acting as drag factors. The only year with bigger output was 1999, before a Taliban edict completely stopped production.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of UNODC, urged Nato and the US-led alliance to fight the drugs trade and gave a warning in words usually reserved for war. "In Afghanistan drugs are now a clear and present danger," he said.

The US, worried about narcotics funding terrorism, is promising to spend $780m (£420m) next year on a war against drugs. Some money will be spent on alternative livelihoods for farmers, but most will probably go on measures such as spraying poppy fields, currently being discussed in Washington, and transporting drugs barons to US courts to stand trial.

Before going to war on the Taliban, Mr Blair promised Afghans: "This time we will not walk away from you." Last week he vowed that a fresh assault on Afghanistan's opium poppy trade is to be launched. Britain is leading the international effort to stem production and has provided £70m over three years to fight the trade.
Oh, the irony of it!
Back to normal, eh?

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More of the same:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=584401
Where every farmer grows opium because they would be 'fools' to grow anything else

By Nick Meo in Jalalabad

19 November 2004

Sowab Khan claims he has planted no opium this year. Onions and wheat are all that will be sprouting in his fields after the Kabul government issued a ban, he insisted yesterday, although a teacher in a nearby school said every farmer in the district grows poppy because they would be fools to grow anything else.

For dirt-poor farmers, opium brings 10 times the price of wheat. And they have never had it so good. Three years after the fall of the Taliban, the crop demonised by the West is flourishing in the new Afghanistan it has forged. This year, 1,300 square kilometres of poppies were growing, an all-time high.

Many fear bloodshed and increased instability if the drugs war becomes a shooting war, as looks almost inevitable. In Kabul, it is increasingly obvious that drugs money is taking over the city and rebuilding it. Construction sites where fake marble mansions are sprouting and roads are clogged with fleets of expensive four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers are testimony to the profits of a trade spawning epic corruption eating at the new Afghanistan from the inside.

The involvement of government officials, police officers and warlords making vast profits is discussed by diplomats and drugs experts in private. In public, none of the key players have been named.

High-profile raids are promised by interdiction teams such as Force 333, the British Army-trained Swat team which reportedly wiped out 50 heroin laboratories this year. Yet they have not arrested even one of the known big players.

An Afghan aid worker in Jalalabad was scathing. "A ban on cultivation will just mean prices go much higher, and that will make money for warlords who hold big stockpiles. People say one of the local officials in Nangarahar Province has 700 tons of opium. These are guys who used to fight the Taliban for the Americans; now they are making big money out of opium. Nobody wants this business in Afghanistan. But will the government go after the big players who create a market and run the trade or will they go after the farmers who are trying to survive?"

Aid workers are also concerned about the shape of the new drugs war. Dave Mather, from AfghanAid, said farmers should be given more help to reduce their dependency on growing opium. "Nobody wants to live in a narco-state but if we saw a similar commitment to dealing with people at the top as with the powerless opium poppy farmer, a lot of people would have more faith in a war on drugs."

Many of the prisoners inside Pul-e-Charki jail near Kabul are in for drugs offences. But they are small-time smugglers and dealers. One inmate, Kochi, who has been held for four months and says he is innocent, told the BBC: "From where I'm seeing it, these drugs barons have connections with the government and that's why they're never arrested. I think if the government took it seriously they could arrest the big guys rather than teasing small people like me."

Although dealers and smugglers are likely targets for Western soldiers, the risk is high that 2.3 million farmers like Sowab Khan and their families who depend on poppy for livelihoods may become collateral damage. Eradication, the solution Kabul's government and its Western backers favour, threatens to beggar many farmers

As their fields are destroyed, the price of warlords' hoarded opium is sure to increase. In Jalalabad, in the past two months, just talk of eradication has pushed the price up from $70 (£38) a kilo to $400, profits made by dealers not farmers. Alternative livelihoods, such as planting different crops, are widely touted by Western politicians including the Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell, who insisted yesterday that British-led anti-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan are on the right track.

Nobody has found an alternative crop Afghan farmers will plant, because they know that with no roads to take crops to market there is nothing else they can grow that will pay for their childrens' clothes or repairs to their homes. To the farmer, the prospect of losing his only cash crop in Afghanistan's looming drugs war threatens his family with starvation. "We will have to leave again and go to Pakistan to a refugee camp, like we did when the Russians were here," Sowab Khan said.

Many farmers such as Mr Khan in Rohdat district, near Jalalabad in the east of Afghanistan, have already borrowed heavily from moneylenders to plant opium. Now they face financial disaster as massive eradication is promised to slay the dragon of the opium trade before it consumes the new democracy George Bush promised Afghans when he toppled the Taliban three years ago.
A pretty tale of Nation Building.