Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition

by Ahmed Rashid

  In Mazar stands the Tomb of Rabia Balkhi, a beautiful, tragic medieval poetess. She was the first woman of her time to write love poetry in Persian and died tragically after her brother slashed her wrists as punishment for sleeping with a slave lover. She wrote her last poem in her own blood as she lay dying. For centuries young Uzbek girls and boys treated her tomb with saint-like devotion and would pray there for success in their love affairs. After the Taliban captured Mazar, they placed her tomb out of bounds. Love, even for a medieval saint, was now out of bounds.

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  HIGH ON HEROIN:

  DRUGS AND THE

  TALIBAN ECONOMY

  Just two miles from Kandahar's city centre poppy fields stretch as far as the horizon. In the spring of 1997, farmers were carefully tending the young, green, lettuce-like leaves of the plants which had been planted a few weeks earlier. They meticulously hoed the soil to uproot weeds, sprinkled fertilizer and repaired irrigation ditches destroyed by the Soviet army in the 1980s to provide water to the fields. In a few weeks the leaves would sprout a bright red flower which would bloom until its petals fell away to reveal a hardened capsule.

  Four months after sowing the poppy seeds, the capsules would be ready to be lanced with thin, home-made blades for their liquid gold. The farmer would squeeze each capsule with his fingers until a milky-white gooey substance oozed out. By the next day the opium would solidify into a brown gum which would be scraped off with a trowel. This operation would be repeated every few days until the plant stopped yielding any gum. The raw opium would be collected, slapped together in a cake and kept wet in plastic bags until the dealers arrived. The best quality opium, generally obtained from well-irrigated land, has a dark brown colour and sticky texture. It is called tor, the substance which lubricates the finances of all the Afghan warlords, but particularly the Taliban.1

  ‘We cannot be more grateful to the Taliban,’ said Wali Jan, a toothless, elderly farmer as he weeded his fields. ‘The Taliban have brought us security so we can grow our poppy in peace. I need the poppy crop to support my 14 family members,’ he added. The Taliban objective of reestablishing peace and security in the countryside has proved to be an immense boon to opium farming. On his small plot of land Wali Jan produces 45 kilograms of raw opium every year and earns about US$1,300 – a small fortune for Afghan farmers. Wali Jan knows that refined heroin fetches 50 times that price in London or New York, but he is more than happy with what he gets. The results of this cash flow are evident everywhere, for there is more reconstruction going on in villages around Kandahar than anywhere else in Afghanistan.

  The Taliban have provided an Islamic sanction for farmers like Wali Jan to grow even more opium, even though the Koran forbids Muslims from producing or imbibing intoxicants. Abdul Rashid, the head of the Taliban's anti-drugs control force in Kandahar, spelt out the nature of his unique job. He is authorised to impose a strict ban on the growing of hashish, ‘because it is consumed by Afghans and Muslims’. But, Rashid tells me without a hint of sarcasm, ‘Opium is permissable because it is consumed by kafirs [unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or Afghans.’ There are other political imperatives for letting poppy farming flourish. ‘We let people cultivate poppies because farmers get good prices. We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan,’ he said.2

  Governor Mohammed Hassan justifies this unique policy with another twist. ‘Drugs are evil and we would like to substitute poppies with another cash crop, but it's not possible at the moment, because we do not have international recognition.’ Over the next two years, Mullah Omar was to periodically offer the US and the UN an end to poppy cultivation, if the Taliban were given international recognition – the first time a movement controlling 90 per cent of a country had offered the international community such an option.

  The Taliban had quickly realized the need to formalize the drugs economy in order to raise revenue. When they first captured Kandahar they had declared they would eliminate all drugs and US diplomats were encouraged enough by the announcement to make immediate contact with the Taliban. However, within a few months the Taliban realized that they needed the income from poppies and would anger farmers by banning it. They began to collect an Islamic tax called zakat on all dealers moving opium. According to the Koran, Muslims should give 2.5 per cent of their disposable income as zakat to the poor, but the Taliban had no religious qualms in collecting 20 per cent of the value of a truckload of opium as zakat. Alongside this, individual commanders and provincial governors imposed their own taxes to keep their coffers full and their soldiers fed. Some of them became substantial dealers in opium or used their relatives to act as middlemen.

  Meanwhile the Taliban crackdown against hashish, a staple part of Afghan truck-drivers diets was extremely effective – demonstrating that any crackdown on opium could be just as strictly implemented. In two warehouses in Kandahar hundreds of sacks of hashish were stored after being confiscated from growers and dealers. Ordinary people said they were too scared to take hashish after the Taliban had forbidden it. For those who continued to do so clandestinely, the Taliban had devised a novel approach to curing hashish addiction. ‘When we catch hashish smugglers or addicts we interrogate and beat them mercilessly to find out the truth,’ said Abdul Rashid. ‘Then we put them in cold water for many hours, two or three times a day. It's a very good cure,’ he added.3 Rashid then strode into the jail and pulled out several terrified prisoner-addicts to talk to me. They had no hesitation in agreeing that the Taliban's shock therapy was effective. ‘When I am beaten or in the cold water I forget all about hashish,’ said Bakht Mohammed, a shopkeeper and hashish dealer who was serving three months in jail.

  Between 1992 and 1995 Afghanistan had produced a steady 2200–2400 metric tonnes of opium every year, rivalling Burma as the world's largest producer of raw opium. In 1996 Afghanistan produced 2,250 metric tonnes. Officials of the United Nations Drugs Control Programme (UNDCP) said that in 1996 Kandahar province alone produced 120 metric tonnes of opium harvested from 3,160 hectares of poppy fields – a staggering increase from 1995, when only 79 metric tonnes was produced from 2,460 hectares. Then, in 1997, as Taliban control extended to Kabul and furthur north, Afghanistan's opium production rose by a staggering 25 per cent to 2,800 metric tonnes. The tens of thousands of Pashtun refugees arriving in Taliban-controlled areas from Pakistan were farming their lands for the easiest and most lucrative cash crop available.

  According to the UNDCP, farmers received less than 1 per cent of the total profits generated by the opium trade, another 2.5 per cent remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the hands of dealers, while 5 per cent was spent in the countries through which the heroin passed while en route to the West. The rest of the profits were made by the dealers and distributors in Europe and the US. Even with this low rate of return, it is conservatively estimated that some one million Afghan farmers are making over US$100 million dollars a year on account of growing poppies. The Taliban were thus raking in at least US$20 million in taxes and even more on the side.

  Ever since 1980, all the Mujaheddin warlords had used drugs money to help fund their military campaigns and line their own pockets. They had bought houses and businesses in Peshawar, new jeeps and kept bank accounts abroad. Publicly they refused to admit that they indulged in drugs trafficking, but always blamed their Mujaheddin rivals for doing so. But none had ever been so brazen, or honest, in declaring their lack of intention to control drugs as the Taliban. By 1997, UNDCP and the US estimated that 96 per cent of Afghan heroin came from areas under Taliban control.

  The Taliban had done more than just expand the area available for opium production. Their conquests had also expanded trade and transport routes significantly. Several times a month heavily armed convoys in Toyota landcruisers left Helmand province, where 50 per cent of Afghan opium is grown, for a long, dusty journey. Some
convoys travelled south across the deserts of Baluchistan to ports on Pakistan's Makran coast, others entered western Iran, skirted Tehran and travelled on to eastern Turkey. Other convoys went north-west to Herat and Turkmenistan. By 1997 dealers began flying out opium on cargo planes from Kandahar and Jalalabad to Gulf ports such as Abu Dhabi and Sharjah.

  Central Asia was the hardest hit by the explosion in Afghan heroin. The Russian mafia, with ties to Afghanistan established during the Soviet occupation, used their networks to move heroin through Central Asia, Russia, the Baltics and into Europe. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan developed important opium routes and became significant opiate producers themselves. Whereas previously Afghan opium would be refined in laboratories in Pakistan, a crackdown in Pakistan and the new diversification in routes encouraged dealers to set up their own laboratories inside Afghanistan. Acetic anhydride, a chemical necessary to convert opium into heroin was smuggled into Afghanistan via Central Asia.

  The explosion in heroin production began ironically not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. Pakistan had become a major opium producer during the 1980s producing around 800 metric tonnes a year or 70 per cent of the world's supply of heroin until 1989. An immense narcotics trade had developed under the legitimizing umbrella of the CIA-ISI covert supply line to the Afghan Mujaheddin. ‘During the 1980s corruption, covert operations and narcotics became intertwined in a manner which makes it difficult to separate Pakistan's narcotics traffic from more complex questions of regional security and insurgent warfare,’ said a landmark 1992 study on the failure of US narcotics policy.4 As in Vietnam where the CIA chose to ignore the trade in drugs by anti-communist guerrillas whom the CIA was financing, so in Afghanistan the US chose to ignore the growing collusion between the Mujaheddin, Pakistani drugs traffickers and elements in the military.

  Instances of this collusion that did come to light in the 1980s were only the tip of the iceberg. In 1983 the ISI Chief, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman had to remove the entire ISI staff in Quetta, because of their involvement with the drugs trade and sale of CIA supplied weapons that were meant for the Mujaheddin.5 In 1986, Major Zahooruddin Afridi was caught while driving to Karachi from Peshawar with 220 kilograms of high-grade heroin – the largest drugs interception in Pakistan's history. Two months later an airforce officer Flight Lieutenant Khalilur Rehman was caught on the same route with another 220 kilograms of heroin. He calmly confessed that it was his fifth mission. The US street value of just these two caches was US$600 million dollars, equivalent to the total amount of US aid to Pakistan that year. Both officers were held in Karachi until they mysteriously escaped from jail. ‘The Afridi-Rehman cases pointed to a heroin syndicate within the army and the ISI linked to Afghanistan,’ wrote Lawrence Lifschultz.6

  The US Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) had 17 full-time officers in Pakistan during the 1980s, who identified 40 major heroin syndicates, including some headed by top government officials. Not a single syndicate was broken up during that decade. There was clearly a conflict of interest between the CIA which wanted no embarrassing disclosures about drug links between the ‘heroic’ Mujaheddin and Pakistani officials and traffickers and the DEA. Several DEA officials asked to be relocated and at least one resigned, because the CIA refused to allow them to carry out their duties.

  During the jihad both the Mujaheddin and officers in the communist army in Kabul seized the opportunity. The logistics of their operations were remarkably simple. The donkey, camel and truck convoys which carried weapons into Afghanistan were coming back empty. Now they carried out raw opium. The CIA–ISI bribes that were paid off to the Pashtun chiefs to allow weapons convoys through their tribal areas, soon involved the same tribal chiefs allowing heroin runs along the same routes back to Pakistan. The National Logistics Cell, an army-run trucking company which transported CIA weapons from Karachi port to Peshawar and Quetta, was frequently used by well-connected dealers to transport heroin back to Karachi for export. The heroin pipeline in the 1980s could not have operated without the knowledge, if not connivance, of officials at the highest level of the army, the government and the CIA. Everyone chose to ignore it for the larger task was to defeat the Soviet Union. Drugs control was on nobody's agenda.

  It was not until 1992, when General Asif Nawaz became Pakistan's army chief, that the military began a concerted effort to root out the narcotics mafia that had developed in the Pakistani armed forces. Nevertheless, heroin money had now penetrated Pakistan's economy, politics and society. Western anti-narcotics agencies in Islamabad kept track of drugs lords, who became Members of the National Assembly during the first governments of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1988–90) and Nawaz Sharif (1990–93). Drugs lords funded candidates to high office in both Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League. Industry and trade became increasingly financed by laundered drugs money and the black economy, which accounted for between 30 and 50 per cent of the total Pakistan economy, was heavily subsidised by drugs money.

  It was only after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that US and Western pressure began to mount on Islamabad to curtail the production of opium in Pakistan. Over the following decade (1989-99) some US$100 million dollars of Western aid to combat narcotics was made available to Pakistan. Poppy cultivation was drastically reduced from a high of 800 tons to 24 tons in 1997 and two tons by 1999. Crop substitution projects in the NWFP proved to be extremely successful. Nevertheless the dealers and the transport mafia never went away and they received a major boost with the arrival of the Taliban and the subsequent increase in Afghan heroin production. Pakistan was no longer a heroin producer, but it became a major transport route for Taliban heroin exports. The same dealers, truck drivers, madrassa and government contacts and the arms, fuel and food supply chain that provided the Taliban with its supplies also funnelled drugs – just as the arms pipeline for the Mujaheddin had done in the 1980s.

  Pakistan was slipping back into bad habits. In February 1998 the Clinton administration accused Islamabad of doing little to curb production and exports of heroin. The US refused to certify that Pakistan was curbing narcotics production, but gave a waiver on the grounds of US national security interests.7 But the drugs problem was now no longer confined to Pakistan and Afghanistan. As export routes multiplied in all directions, there was a dramatic increase in drug consumption across the region. By 1998, 58 per cent of opiates was consumed within the region itself and only 42 per cent was actually being exported.8 Pakistan, which had no heroin addicts in 1979, had 650,000 addicts in 1986, three million by 1992 and an estimated five million by 1999. Heroin addiction and drugs money fuelled law and order problems, unemployment and allowed ethnic and sectarian extremist groups to arm themselves.

  In Iran, the government admitted to having 1.2 million addicts in 1998, but senior officials in Tehran told me the figure was nearer three million -even though Iran had one of the toughest anti-narcotics policies in the world, where anyone caught with a few ounces of heroin faced the death penalty automatically.9 And Iran had tried much harder than Pakistan to keep the drugs menace away. Since the 1980s Iran had lost 2,500 men from its security forces in military operations to stop convoys carrying drugs from Afghanistan. After Iran closed its borders with Afghanistan during the tensions with the Taliban in September 1998, Iranian security forces caught five tons of heroin on the border in a few weeks. The Taliban faced a major financial crisis as the closed border led to a drop in heroin exports and tax revenue.

  Heroin addiction was also increasing in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan as they became part of the heroin export chain. In 1998 guards on the Tajikistan–Afghanistan border confiscated one ton of opium and 200 kilograms of heroin. In January 1999, Tajikistan's President Imomali Rakhmanov told an international conference that drugs were being smuggled into his country from Afghanistan at the rate of one ton a day and addiction was increasing. Uzbekistan said there was an 11 per cent increase of drugs from Afghanistan during 1998.


  I saw heroin being openly sold outside five-star hotels in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, and inside the hotels flashy Turkmen and Russian mafioso with their even flashier girlfriends, spoke of their trips to the Afghan border ‘to do business’. In 1997 two tons of heroin and 38 tons of hashish were seized by the authorities. By 1999, Turkmenistan, with its conciliatory policy with the Taliban had become the principle route of export for Afghan heroin with corrupt Turkmen officials benefiting from the trade.10 President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan told me in January 1999, that his country was now ‘a major route for drugs trafficking and it is responsible for the growth of crime’. Akayev said the war against drugs could not be won until there was peace in Afghanistan and the civil war had become the most destabilizing factor in the region.11

  The heroin explosion emanating from Afghanistan is now affecting the politics and economics of the entire region. It is crippling societies, distorting the economies of already fragile states and creating a new narco-elite which is at odds with the ever increasing poverty of the population. ‘Drugs is determining the politics of this region as never before,’ said a Western ambassador in Islamabad. ‘We equate it now with other serious threats such as Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism and potential economic collapse in some of these countries,’ he added.12

  This worsening situation prompted attempts by the international community to talk to the Taliban. After six months of secret negotiations UNDCP concluded an agreement with the Taliban in October 1997. The Taliban agreed to eradicate poppy growing if the international community provided funds to help farmers with substitute crops. Pino Arlacchi, the head of UNDCP asked for US$25 million from donors for a ten-year programme to eliminate poppy farming in areas controlled by the Taliban. ‘Afghan heroin supplies 80 per cent of Europe's supply of heroin and 50 per cent of the world's supply of heroin. We are talking about eliminating half the heroin of the world,’ Arlacchi said enthusiastically.13 UNDCP said it would introduce new cash crops, improve irrigation, build new factories and pay for law enforcement.