by Fariba Nawa
withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989), 17, 30–31, 34, 52–53
Sufi, 65
Sufi, Haji (Haji Tor; husband of Darya), 104–5, 118–24, 129, 147–48, 273–74, 276–77, 279, 289, 290–91, 295, 304
suicide bombings, 226, 268–69
assassination of Massoud, 12, 56, 179, 219, 230
in Kabul, 310–12
survivor’s guilt, 2, 29–30
Tajbeg Palace (Kabul), 42
Tajikistan, 174, 230, 237, 242, 244, 257
Tajiks, 36, 99, 174, 200, 227, 242–46, 251, 282
Takhar province, 229, 230–57
Amniat (federal secret police), 233–35, 238–41, 249
described, 232, 251–52
drug raids, 233–35, 238–40
kidnapping of children in, 247–50, 257
test of democracy in, 247–48
Taliban
arrests of drug kingpins, 260
assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, 12, 56, 179, 219, 230
Badakhshan province and, 160
ban on poppy cultivation (2000), 18, 67–68, 74–75, 156, 172, 175, 181–82
controls on women, 5–7, 18, 21–23, 26, 28, 46, 76, 80, 88–89, 93, 125, 284–86, 306
dress requirements for women, 7, 21–23, 28, 46, 93, 186, 280–81, 285, 289, 293, 299–300
education ban for women, 22, 26, 79, 98, 100, 125
in failure of alternative livelihood program, 159–60
fear of women, 8
formation of, 17–18
Grishk Shiites and, 288
in Helmand province, 276, 284–86, 300–301
in Herat province, 21–22, 27, 86–87, 100
music ban, 7, 8–9, 22–23, 76, 77
new code of law, 18
opium trade as funding for, 2, 32, 34, 100, 113, 134–35, 138, 205–6, 306. see also opium trade
origins of, 17–18, 280
ouster from Afghanistan (2001), 68, 73, 156, 185–86, 225
provides drugs to enemy troops, 196
Quetta Alliance and, 135–36, 260–61, 272, 309
relationship with al Qaeda, 31–32, 56, 66, 226, 306
resistance to Karzai, 268–69, 305–6
seizes control of central Afghanistan, 17–18, 44–45
seizes Herat (1995), 100
in Takhar province, 231–32
Taraki, Nur Mohammed, 38–42
Tarana (wife of Saber), 94–96, 110, 116, 118, 278
Tarar, Amir, 37
Tarek (opium dealer), 138–40
taslimis (surrenderers), 46
television
satellite, 22, 23, 269
Taliban ban on, 22, 23
in the U.S., 58–59
Thailand, 310
tomban (hand-embroidered pants), 131
Torbat-e-Jam, Iran, 109, 112
Totakai (opium smuggler), 212–14
Touraj (father of Darya), 100, 101–4, 121, 296, 300
Turkey, drug smuggling to, 177
Turkish mafia, 230
Turkmen, 36, 191
Turpikay, 297
United Arab Emirates, drug trade with, 136
United Front, 66
United Kingdom, Afghan poppy output, 157
United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 87–89, 310–11
report on counternarcotics strategy, 307
reports on poppy farming, 150–51, 157–58, 167
statistics on heroin laboratories, 237
statistics on opium trade, 34, 141–42, 177, 308
United States
Afghan refugees in, 7, 41, 58–66, 72–73, 314–15
antinarcotics policies of, 2–3, 33, 196, 258, 262, 306–7
author’s family arrives in, 58–60
author’s family seeks asylum in, 7, 45
Bonn Agreement (2001), 68, 79, 157, 225–26
drug addiction in, 195–96
drug use in, 60–62, 65–66, 195–96
drug wars and, 2–3, 196, 258, 262
formation of Afghan government, 78–79
funding for alternative livelihood programs, 159, 160
invades Afghanistan, 66–68
Iranian Revolution (1979), 43–44
provides weapons to mujahideen rebels, 12, 32, 42–43, 185–86
proxy conflict with the Soviet Union, 31–33, 179–80
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 4, 12, 55–58, 75, 179
withdrawal from Afghanistan, 175, 305–6, 308
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 2–3, 134–37, 196, 258, 262
U.S. Marines, 306–7, 315
Urdu, 29
Urumqi, China, 136–37
USAID, 159
Uzan, Cem, 136
Uzbeks, 36, 174, 230–31, 249, 251
Viet Cong, 43
Vietnam War, 33, 43
Wali, Shah, 262–63, 272
Walwaluji, Assadullah, 250–52
warlords. see mujahideen rebels
water, shortage in Afghanistan, 9, 17–18, 101, 153, 155, 158, 165, 248, 267–68
weapons smuggling, 134–35
wheat, 25, 152, 165–66, 181–82, 232, 259, 308
Wilson, Charlie, 42
women
Afghan refugees in the U.S., 58–66
double standard for, 62–64, 172–73, 220–21
as drug smugglers, 212–14
Iranian dress requirements, 5, 7, 44, 166, 276–77, 282, 299–300, 318
Khalqi attempt at women’s liberation, 40
literacy campaign for, 40
Mehri (Afghan women’s magazine), 9
Mother’s Day in Ghoryan (2002), 79–85
in the National Interdiction Unit (NIU), 199–204, 207–8, 217
women (cont.)
as opium addicts, 190–95
as poppy farmers, 149–56, 160–62, 163, 209
prisons for runaways, 125
protection from news of death, 271
in Pul-e-Charkhi prison, 211–15
in the Rapid Reaction Force, 207–11
requirement for male travel companions, 6–8, 18–21, 22, 27–29, 121, 298–99
self-immolation as protest, 89, 91, 114, 122, 164
Taliban controls on, 5–7, 18, 21–23, 26, 28, 46, 76, 80, 88–89, 93, 125, 284–86, 306
Taliban dress requirements, 7, 21–23, 28, 46, 93, 186, 280–81, 285, 289, 293, 299–300
Taliban fear of, 8
World Trade Center
predictions for future attack, 56–57
September 11, 2001 attacks, 4, 12, 55–58, 75, 179
Yosuf (kidnap victim), 247–50, 257
Zabi (travel partner), 280–81
Zahir, Ahmed, 62, 189, 211–12
Zahir, King Mohammed, 33, 35–36, 78–79, 189, 274–75, 303, 309
Zainab (policewoman), 207–11, 214
Zakhilwal, Omar, 79
Zikria (retired opium smuggler), 132–34
Zir Koh district, 140
Zulaikha (wife of great-uncle), 21, 25–26
Acknowledgments
Dozens of individuals helped me complete this book. I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to those whose names I cannot divulge but who were an integral part of the process. You know who you are. For those I can name, thank you first and foremost to my research partners, Matthew DuPee, Fayaz Siddiqi, Farhad Azad, and Naeem Poyesh, for spending their precious time fact-checking and providing invaluable information. To my family: my parents, my sister and her family, my brother and his family, and the aunts and uncles who endured hours of questioning and prying into their personal lives and our family history. I’m indebted to my mother-in-law, Zahra Azizian, and brother-in-law Younes Azizian for their unwavering support for this book. My agent, Rebecca Friedman, and editors, Allison Lorentzen and Maya Ziv, believed in this book and worked hard to make it happen. Thanks also to Barnett Rubin and the Open Society Institute for the grant that made it possible for me to research the Afghan drug trade. OSI’s partner
organization in Kabul, the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society, and the FCCS colleagues who helped with research and logistics, Said Niazi and Omar Sharifi, were instrumental in giving me a place to work in Kabul. My editor Cathy Galvin at the Sunday Times Magazine in London was the first to give Darya’s story a voice by publishing it. Freelance photographers Massoud Hossaini and Farzana Wahidy risked their lives traveling to Ghoryan to photograph Darya and her family at the beginning of their careers, and I’m happy to see them now as two of Afghanistan’s renowned photographers, and engaged to be married. Massoud, thank you for allowing your photos to be used on the cover of this book. I’m also grateful to the friends and colleagues who gave ideas, feedback, and support: Khaled Hosseini, Leela Jacinto, Annia Ciezadlo, Mary Rajkumar, Angeles Espinosa, Maryam Miazad, Maneeza Aminy, Yama Rahimy, Fahima Danishgar, Khalid Khaliqi, Manavi Menon, Omar Karim, Anna Ghosh, Esmael Darman, Patricia Omidian, Botoul Maqsodi, Daanish Masood, Hanaa Arafat, Nushin Arbabzadah, Homa Clifford, Pratap Chatterjee, Mir Hekmat Sadat, Katrin Fakiri, Homira Nassery, Nell Bernstein, Joel Hafvenstein, Graeme Smith, Aunohita Mojumdar, Manizha Naderi, and Mahesh and his staff at Suju’s Coffee in Fremont. I will always be grateful to Fawzia and Mohammed Y. Akbarzad for taking wonderful care of my daughter, Bonoo, in the hours I wrote this book.
To my husband, Naeem, tashakor for being there during all the difficult and grueling moments of writing and research, for your patience and partnership, and for your encouragement and love.
Photo Section
My sister and me in Herat before the Communist coup.
Families rent private vineyards to swim, eat, and relax on weekends in Herat.
My family—me on the left at age nine, my mother, my sister Faiza, and my father—waits in Islamabad, Pakistan, for a visa to either the United States or Germany in 1982.
Me at age seven in Herat during the Soviet invasion.
Shortly after the Communist coup, my brother Hadi escaped from Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany.
These girls climb through a window dividing their homes in Ghoryan. Extended families in Afghanistan can live on the same plot of land divided by mud-brick walls.
Aabi, Gandomi’s daughter, and her son Maqsud in a moment of happiness.
The Amu River in Samti district. It divides Afghanistan from Tajikistan, and traffickers with boatloads of heroin cross the river nightly from the province of Takhar into Tajikistan.
Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, is located along the Kokcha River.
Under these stones lie two of Gandomi’s children in a makeshift graveyard she visits every Friday.
The pots and equipment seized from the heroin laboratory raid in the village of Bekha.
These three girls, one dressed as a man, perform a skit against drug abuse in their high school in Ghoryan.
Some three thousand women gather in Ghoryan High School to protest the penetration of the drug trade in their community.
Drug addicts loiter in the yard of the first addiction treatment center in Herat.
On the highway from Kandahar to Helmand in 2002, our driver smokes hashish as he smoothly navigates the bumpy road.
A laborer toils in the fields for many hours oozing out the opium gum from poppy bulbs in Argu, Badakhshan.
The woman hides her face from the camera, saying she’s ashamed to have to work in the poppy fields.
In Herat, Afghans prepare for Eid guests after a month of fasting during Ramadan.
Me sitting on the steps of my maternal grandfather’s orchard home on my first trip back to Herat in eighteen years.
About the Author
FARIBA NAWA has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, The Sunday Times Magazine (London), Newsday, and the Village Voice. She has been a guest on CBS's 48 Hours as well as numerous other television and radio shows on NPR, the BBC, MTV, and NBC. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.
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Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs © Massoud Hossaini; © Massoud Hossaini/Getty Images
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them, to the best of my ability. Some names, identities, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the integrity and/or anonymity of the various individuals involved, and who have a right to tell their own stories if they so choose. Though conversations come from my keen recollection of them in my native language, Farsi, they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation in English; rather, I’ve retold and interpreted them in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said, in keeping with the true essence of the mood and spirit of the event.
Lyrics from “Dar Een Ghorbat” (“In This Exile”) reprinted with permission from Farhad Darya. Copyright © 2011 by Farhad Darya. www.farhaddarya.info. All rights reserved.
OPIUM NATION. Copyright © 2011 by Fariba Nawa. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Photographs courtesy of the author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Nawa, Fariba.
Opium nation : child brides, drug lords, and one woman’s journey through Afghanistan / Fariba Nawa.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-193470-4
1. Opium trade—Social aspects—Afghanistan. 2. Drug traffic—Social aspects—Afghanistan. 3. Women—Social conditions—Afghanistan. 4. Afghanistan—Social conditions—21st century. 5. Afghanistan—Social life and customs—21st century. I. Title.
HD9675.O653A363 2011
958.104’7—dc23 2011028527
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062100610
11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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