Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  Perhaps the New York branch of the Black Panthers, the Marxist black rights group, had one eye on Lucas when they published a paper in 1970 about the heroin that was ravaging their Harlem community: ‘Drug addiction is a monstrous symptom of the malignancy which is ravaging the social fabric of this capitalist system.’42 Nevertheless, it was a hugely successful system for Lucas, and GIs both living and dead made him a very rich man, with a several-thousand-acre ranch, numerous properties, both private and investment, and millions of dollars in Cayman bank accounts. The fall had to come, and in January 1975, he was arrested at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey and later sentenced to seventy years in prison, although he only served five and was put on lifetime parole. Three years later, he was caught doing a drug deal, and served another seven years. His assets either confiscated or gone, his biographer Mark Jacobson recalls him ‘living in a beat-up project apartment and driving an even more beat-up 1979 Caddy with a bad transmission’.43 Frank Lucas, in his heyday, served as a direct link between the East Coast of America and the Golden Triangle heroin trade, forging business ties with associates across the world.

  Back in Vietnam, the US government instigated a testing programme for heroin, where GIs had to prove they were clean before they were allowed to return home. Jaffe helped establish methadone clinics in response to the perceived need following Vietnam. Yet the test results were surprising for everyone who imagined that the US troops had become feral junkies in Vietnam: almost all of them gave up instantly in order to return home. The government monitored them for the following year, and most did not relapse. The idea of the drug-crazed GI in the jungle was simply not borne out by the results of the testing. Yet there was no doubt many hundreds of thousands of young men were psychologically damaged by the war.

  Philip Caputo, a young GI who graduated from college and went straight to war, served for three years. On returning to the US he realized that he could strip an M16 rifle with his eyes closed, but that he did not know how to do anything in civilian life. Vietnam had taken a generation of American boys and equipped them only for war. ‘I came home with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then fifty-one.’44

  When President Nixon made that speech on drugs in 1971, America was worried about shipping back an army of addicts, but it is a sad irony that it is far more likely they were busy creating one at home. Before the War on Drugs, Vietnam was the only war America had ever lost.

  Chapter Nine

  AFGHANISTAN

  ‘There is no such thing as joy there. There is no such thing as peace, or comfort, or rest or ease . . . Life is serious from the start to the close, and the very children who act as messengers learn to gossip and intrigue from their infancy.’1

  Lillias Hamilton, doctor to the emir Abdur Rahman Khan

  There are few places as untouched by modernity as Afghanistan. Marco Polo would still recognize the Roof of the World in Badakhshan, almost unchanged in 800 years. To understand how and why Afghanistan became the producer of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin, it is necessary to understand the history of this ‘harsh, beautiful, and brutal land’.2 Dynasties such as the Persian Ghaznavids, who ruled at the turn of the first millennium, made Afghanistan a centre of the Muslim world during Islam’s golden age, home to 400 poets and 900 scholars. A summer residence and the military training academy was at Bost, now Lashkar Gar, which means ‘Place of the Soldiers’. The modern Afghan people romanticize this time of literature, science and music, although they are an almost completely non-literate society.

  The devastation wreaked by the Mongols, in particular destroying the Islamic focus of culture and learning that was Herat, returned Afghanistan to a rural society, which it has remained for centuries. It is home to over twenty different ethnic people including the Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and the nomadic Kuchi people. These people fight fiercely amongst themselves, but unite under the Afghan identity with just as much determination. The two official languages are Pashto and Dari, a Persian dialect. They are almost all proud Muslims, yet outside the main cities most villages practise folklore rituals that hark back to the Buddhism and Zoroastrianism that was displaced by Islam. Dependent on herbal and plant remedies, they have used the opium poppy for millennia. The children drink poppy tea made from the exhausted seed capsules steeped in boiling water. The men often carry a piece of poppy capsule between their cheek and gum, and the women eat the latex to ease their aching backs as they pound grain on work carpets, seemingly oblivious to the bitterness. As a herbal remedy the opium poppy is an integral part of their daily lives. Those who farmed it lived mainly in the Afghan mountains, where the conditions conspire to create a poppy with a particularly powerful alkaloid yield, superior even to the Egyptian poppy. There, they would make their flat cakes of opium, wrapped in the poppy petals, stamp them with their own identifying mark, pack them onto a donkey or a mule, and send them off to the closest market town like a farmer’s wife sending her butter to market. Prior to the 1970s, much of this opium went to Iran to supply the illegal market after the shah’s 1955 ban.

  Afghans feel that they are ground between a huge set of mill-wheels, comprising Russia to the north, Pakistan to the east and south, and Iran to the west. But to invade Afghanistan is a painful fool’s errand, as Britain, Russia and the United States have discovered. All relationships in Afghanistan are based on kinship, and based around a patriarchal village model. There is no transparency in personal or business transactions, and it is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.3 Over 90 per cent of the population are subsistence farmers, a figure unchanged from a century ago. Before the opium poppy, the country’s main export for centuries was the wool and skins of the Karakul sheep.

  Afghanistan’s first national interactions with Europe began with France’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and Napoleon’s determination to restore a French presence in India, which would mean coming straight through Afghanistan. Russia’s invasion of Kazakhstan in 1734 had already caused alarm in Afghanistan as the threat from the north came closer. The fractious relations between Persia and Russia broke down during the Napoleonic Wars when the French encouraged the Persians to engage with their Russian neighbour. The French influence in the area from the late seventeenth century meant Afghans had absorbed some French ideas, including romantic notions of the Revolution. This influence ended with Waterloo in 1815, when Napoleon’s eastern ambitions were curtailed abruptly.

  The nineteenth century was a pivotal time in Afghan history which could have brought the country towards a modern existence, but British and Russian imperialism ended up driving it further back into its entrenched rural existence. In an ongoing series of battles with the Sikhs in the early part of the century, Afghanistan lost territory and prestige. Dost Mohammad Khan proclaimed himself emir in 1826, determined to stop the Sikh encroachment in the east. He applied to Lord Auckland, governor general of British India, and asked for assistance in settling the Afghan–Sikh dispute. Auckland replied crisply that the British government followed a policy of non-interference in the affairs of independent nations, preferring to maintain the British alliance with the Sikhs. Meanwhile, the Persians were attempting to retake Herat in the west, now with the support of Russia. In response, Auckland gathered the Army of the Indus in 1838 and made it clear to Persia that they saw the invasion of Afghanistan as a threat to British India. The Persians withdrew, but Britain decided Dost Mohammad Khan was too troublesome, invaded Kabul and placed a puppet on the Afghan throne, Shah Shuja. This was, with hindsight, a mistake of mammoth proportions.

  British thinking was that this would protect India, and also stop Russia reaching the warm-water ports in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean which Peter the Great (1682–1725) had begun to covet a century before, feeding into Russia’s greedy delusions of relentless expansion. Britain, now well established trading opium out of India, did not want Russia arriving on the shores between the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the Gujarat coast.


  Initially numbering around 25,000 British and Sikh soldiers, the Army of the Indus invaded in 1839 and suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Afghan tribes. The Afghans had managed to stop the Sikhs at the Khyber Pass two years before, and did not take kindly to this new mass of men marching into their country. So confident were the British of success in Afghanistan that they took their wives and children with them. In Kabul, the British troops endured the privations of the hard Afghan winters, and the incompetent if well-meaning leadership of William Elphinstone. In the winter of 1841–2, the Afghans rose up and Elphinstone was forced to negotiate safe passage to the British garrison at Jalalabad. Unable to comprehend the level of double-crossing endemic in Afghanistan, the British began the retreat with wives and children in tow, and were massacred in their droves at the Gandamak Pass, with few survivors. The only soldier to reach Jalalabad was William Brydon, although some of the women and children made it out. Others were absorbed into the Afghan tribes, such as the wife of a Captain Warburton, who married her captor. Many of the surviving children were adopted locally. It was a catastrophic and tragic defeat, brought about by British hubris.

  This, however, did not stop the British invading again in 1878. Again, this was ostensibly to protect British India from Russia. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879 Afghanistan became a British protectorate and Kabul was opened up to a British mission, something Afghans still consider to be an appalling loss of face. The mission lasted less than two months before it was massacred by outraged tribesmen from Herat. Britain invaded again, expelled the emir, and placed on the throne Dost Mohammad Khan’s grandson, Abdur Rahman Khan (1844–1901), who became known as the Iron Emir.

  Abdur Rahman Khan was not known as the Iron Emir for nothing. He saw his chief task as putting ‘in order all those hundreds of petty chiefs, plunderers, robbers and cutthroats’.4 He established many of the infrastructure systems that still dominate Afghanistan today. He was a vicious, underhand, utterly controlling and callous despot, but he also created departments for education, public works, posts and communication, medicine, public records, as well as a board of treasury and a board of trade, things that had previously been beyond the rigidly feudal and backwards-looking tribespeople. But the real source of his power was the Afghan army, through which he controlled the people absolutely whilst seeking to undermine them at every step by means of espionage, pitting everyone against each other. He was an extraordinary man who was tutored in military tactics as an adolescent by an Anglo-Indian named William Campbell. Campbell was first a soldier in the Sikh forces of Ranjit Singh, then switched sides and fought for the exiled Shah Shuja when he was displaced by Dost Mohammad. Wounded in Kandahar in 1834, he changed sides again, and became quasi-commander-in-chief of Dost Mohammad’s Afghan army. He converted to Islam and took the name General Sher Mohammad Khan as a show of loyalty. When the British placed Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet king, he abandoned his post and returned to Shuja’s service. When Dost Mohammad was returned to Kabul, such was Campbell’s apparent value, he was allowed to remain a general in the Afghan army. As wily and ingenious as any Afghan, he made a lasting impression on the young Abdur Rahman Khan, whose approach to ruling remained firmly military. Abdur Rahman Khan was, however, surprisingly enlightened on certain matters: he suppressed repressive religious leaders and had a female British doctor, Lillias Hamilton, as his personal physician, and Mrs Kate Daly was his harem’s medical advisor. He also employed another English doctor, John Gray, as well as Messrs Pyne, Stewart and Myddleton as engineers, and the well-known mining engineer Arthur Collins.

  However, he also continued the long Afghan tradition of committing genocide against the Hazara people of central Afghanistan. The persecution of the Hazara, like that of the Yazidis of Iraq, is based on an inexplicable tribal hierarchy that has over centuries forced the Hazara to the bottom of the pile, to the point that now no defilement or insult is too grotesque. Even the otherwise sensible Lillias Hamilton described them memorably as ‘broad, squat little persons, with faces like full-moons and heads like rugged bullets’.5 They were ‘cheaper to feed than donkeys, and can carry almost as much’, so they were often kidnapped for slaves.6

  Two historic events marked the Iron Emir’s rule: the Panjdeh Incident, in which Russia captured an Afghan fort on the northern border in 1885, and the drawing of the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1893.

  The Panjdeh Incident took place when Britain and Russia were negotiating the north-west Afghan border and Russia captured Panjdeh Fort, killing 900 Afghans, while only eleven Russians died. The Iron Emir, in Rawalpindi at the time for a meeting with the British, chose to see it as a skirmish rather than an invasion, to avoid Russia and Britain squabbling over his country, and Britain backed away from war. However, when Britain ceded the Panjdeh Fort to maintain peace rather than supporting Afghanistan against Russia as they had pledged at the Treaty of Gandamak, the emir lost any faith in their promises.

  The Anglo-Afghan relationship was further undermined in 1896, when Sir Mortimer Durand was charged with establishing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The 1,510-mile border was drawn through a mountainous region regarded by the West as no man’s land, of which 800 miles were surveyed. Because the mountains are largely uninhabitable, and much of the range impassable, it was deemed a natural border. However, it cut straight through several Pashtun border tribes and through nomad routes. Afghanistan has never recognized it, and the border is in fact highly porous. The Durand Line is regarded by most Afghans as yet another imposition by the British.

  The Iron Emir died in 1901 and his son Habibullah inherited the throne, and his father’s best traits. He was one of Afghanistan’s most liberal leaders, who attempted to introduce modern medicine. He was assassinated on a hunting trip in 1919. However, the same year, Afghanistan did manage to wrest some control of its foreign affairs back from Britain when Habibullah’s third son Amanullah became emir (and later king). Taking after his father, he attempted to modernize Afghanistan: opening co-educational schools and encouraging Western dress in Kabul. He married the daughter of Mahmud Tarzi, a liberal politician who published Afghanistan’s first newspaper, the political and current affairs journal Seraj al Akhbar, in 1911. Tarzi was forced into exile by conservative factions, but in Paris he forged strong links between the urban liberals of Afghanistan and France. Amanullah was much influenced by his father-in-law, and he and his wife Queen Soraya Tarzi visited Europe, and he returned with many ideas about how to change his country. So unpopular were these modern ideas that some Kabul newspapers reported that they were returning with a machine designed to make soap out of corpses.

  Tarzi recommended his son-in-law use the British–Russian rivalry to accept aid payments from both sides, and Russia began payments immediately, also supplying thirteen aeroplanes, pilots, mechanics, transport specialists and telegraph operators. Between 1925 and 1926, Russia laid telephone lines between Herat, Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. By 1928, it was possible to fly from Moscow to Kabul via Tashkent.

  Amanullah’s reforms were too much for the conservatives and he was overthrown in early 1929, although he was allowed to abdicate and he and his wife moved to Switzerland. He was succeeded after a tussle by Mohammad Nadir Khan (1883–1933), formerly a general in the Afghan army. He was also a modernizer, but a much stealthier one than Amanullah, and he placated the religious leaders. His lasting achievement is the road network he began to put in place, including the Great North Road through the Hindu Kush. In June 1933 the Afghan ambassador, and father of the future Afghan prime minister Mohammad Daoud, was visiting Berlin when he was assassinated by student Sayyid Kemal, who accused him of being pro-British. In September, schoolteacher Mohammad Azim entered the British Embassy in Kabul and killed three people, one English, one Indian, one Afghan. Then, on 8 November, Nadir Shah (as he had styled himself) attended a high-school ceremony and was assassinated by fifteen-year-old Hazara schoolboy Abdul Khaliq. Khaliq was executed after ‘Se
curity officers tortured Khaliq by cutting his tongue and gouging his eyes and soldiers killed him with bayonets while his family and friends were forced to watch.’7

  Nadir Shah was succeeded by his son Mohammad Zahir Shah (1914–2007), who was the last king of Afghanistan. Urbane, charming, fluent in French after finishing his education at the University of Montpellier, Zahir Shah was determined to modernize Afghanistan. In 1934, Afghanistan joined the League of Nations and received formal recognition from the United States. He applied for financial aid and expert advice from the US and the Soviet Union. His lasting legacy is the Helmand dam project, which he had built to try and revitalize the Helmand Valley.

  The Helmand River Valley Project

  The Helmand River Valley Authority was established on 4 December 1952. Helmand province lies in the south central part of Afghanistan, bordering Pakistan to the south. It is Afghanistan’s largest and longest province, and its biggest producer of opium. In the north are the fearsome mountains of Baghran, and to the south Dasht-e-Margo or the Desert of Death. The Helmand River is Afghanistan’s longest and rises in the Hindu Kush around fifty miles west of Kabul, running for 710 miles until it disperses into Iran’s Sistan Basin. It is responsible for draining 40 per cent of the country; a river of immense power, which Zahir Shah was determined to harness through a series of dams so that the water could be controlled for irrigation and hydroelectricity.