Taliban and Afghanistan's opium/poppy growing industry

See also Poppy farming days numbered in Southern Helmand

In Poppy War, Taliban Aim to Protect a Cash Crop
By Taimoor Shah and Alissa J. Rubin
Published: April 11, 2012
The New York Times

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — So focused are the Taliban on securing this year’s opium poppy crop — and the support of the farmers tending it — that in the early days of their spring offensive in the south, they are targeting not only the officials trying to eradicate the plants, but also the tractors they use.
This year, the poppy fields that are so beautiful right now, carpeted with lithe red blossoms, are also sown with land mines — the product of the increased cooperation between poppy farmers and the militants they see as protectors of their economic interests, government officials say.

“This year there is more poppy cultivation in Helmand, especially in places where people have confiscated the government lands and in places that were desert,” said Daoud Ahmadi, the spokesman for the governor in Helmand Province. “The reason is that the Taliban promised and persuaded farmers to grow poppy and told them they would protect them.”

One suicide attack this week in Helmand Province, the poppy-growing capital not just of Afghanistan but of the world, was indicative of the far larger fight being taken up to control the crop across the southern opium belt, say government officials and the people who live there.

The multifaceted attack included a team of three suicide bombers, wearing police uniforms, who entered the Musa Qala district police headquarters intent on killing the police chief, who has been aggressive in his poppy-eradication efforts. Four officers died, and the chief was injured.

In the bazaar outside, other Taliban fighters strategically positioned two motorcycles loaded with explosives as close as possible to the tractors used in the anti-poppy campaign, said Niamatullah Khan, the Musa Qala district governor. A third explosives-laden motorcycle detonated elsewhere in the bazaar, killing three more police officers.

In Helmand, the government has embraced eradication as part of a comprehensive program to discourage farmers from growing poppies and to subsidize alternative crops. The program has been most successful in the Helmand River valley, and the Musa Qala district is far from the heart of the effort.

The program has been met with hostility by many local residents who say they are reduced to poverty without the income from the poppy crop. A study by the sociologist David Mansfeld, a researcher for Tufts University, noted that families who grow poppies eat meat more frequently and are more likely to be able to afford to marry off their children — weddings often come with crippling costs in Afghanistan, where relatives far and near must be hosted and fed.

“No one wants to see his poppy field destroyed. A farmer is even ready to fight for his poppy field,” said a merchant in Musa Qala who asked not to be named because the subject was so delicate. “If a son of a farmer is in the government and wants to destroy his father’s poppy field, the father would be happy if his son is killed by Taliban.”

Complicating matters is the hold that poppy profits have on government officials. Local farmers say that eradication is selective, meaning that officials often exempt the fields of relatives or of people who bribe them sufficiently.

In Musa Qala, the police chief — who is known locally only as Koka — has a reputation as a ruthless fighter against the Taliban. He has made it a cause to destroy their poppy fields, but not necessarily those of others, like the policemen who work for him, said several local residents.

While only a small part of the total income from poppies goes to the Taliban — roughly 10 percent, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime — but that adds up to a lot in a $4 billion-plus harvest.

“The police chief made a plan to eradicate the poppy fields of Taliban commanders first and then kill the poppy fields of those who are sympathetic with the Taliban, like landlords who help Taliban or those farmers whose sons or relatives are with Taliban,” the merchant said. “This decision really infuriated Taliban commanders, and by any means the Taliban wanted to kill Koka, so that’s why yesterday they made a big effort. You cannot imagine how lucky he was to survive.”

Mr. Khan, the district governor, described a chaotic scene: after the suicide bombers made their way into the police headquarters — their initial attacks muffled by silencers on their pistols — the chief burst out of his office. But then he hesitated, evidently confused by the attackers’ police uniforms.

One of the chief’s officers shouted, “They are not the real police,” Mr. Khan said. The chief pulled out his pistol and shot one of the attackers; as he did, the man’s suicide vest exploded, wounding the other two bombers and the chief himself. The chief was taken to a NATO hospital, local government officials said.

Mr. Ahmadi, the spokesman in the Helmand Province governor’s office, said the police chief did not give preferential treatment to some farmers while going after the Taliban, but he admitted that the government had found such a pattern in Marja, in central Helmand, with members of the police and the local council being allowed to grow poppies. That has since changed, he said.

He said that the militant leadership known as the Quetta Shura, in need of cash, had instructed the Taliban to plant poppies.

“The only means of income they are relying on now is the poppy in Afghanistan, especially in Helmand Province, so that’s why they are planting mines in poppy fields, staging direct attacks, ambushing the eradication campaign and sometimes engaging in prolonged firefights,” Mr. Ahmadi said.

The intense resistance to eradication means that there will be a substantial poppy harvest in Helmand and that the campaign may create dangerous resentment, Mr. Ahmadi said.

“I do not think it will be possible for the eradication campaign to destroy all the poppy fields in Helmand,” he said. “And any person whose fields are destroyed, he is becoming Taliban.”

Iran's struggle to interdict opium smuggling

The claim by the United Nations that Iran interdicted 89 percent of the world's seized opium, presumably in 2011, is an eyebrow raiser, but the report is still a window on a topic that receives very little discussion in the press

West indifference made Iran flag bearer in anti-narcotics bids: General
Iran Press TV

Head of the Anti-narcotics Division of Iran’s Police Force General Ali Moayedi criticized the Western governments for their inaction in the fight against banned drugs on Thursday, saying, “The countries advocating human rights, especially the Western countries, are indifferent [even] to the wellbeing of their own citizens” and take no measures to reduce the harms that they are subjected to.

General Moayedi further pointed to the successful experiences of the Islamic Republic in the campaign against illegal drugs, saying other countries are now asking for Iran’s aid in their counternarcotics bids.

According to the UN Drug Report 2011, Iran, which shares a 936-kilometer border with Afghanistan and a 909-kilometer border with Pakistan, has intercepted 89 percent of all the opium seized worldwide.

The Iranian government has set up static defenses such as manpower and electronic equipment along its border to maintain more control on the area.

Within a span of thirty years, more than 3700 Iranian police officers have been killed and tens of thousands more injured in counternarcotics operations, mostly on Afghan and Pakistan borders.

UN report on opium hoarding by Afghans gives insight into level of fear about NATO pullout

Afghans store opium as hedge against uncertain future: U.N.
By Jack Kimball
Thu Apr 5, 2012 10:01pm IST
Reuters

(KABUL) - Opium is emerging as a new gold standard in Afghanistan, where traders and farmers are hoarding the drug as a source of ready cash t o hedge against the risk of a power vacuum when foreign troops leave, the country's U.N. drugs tsar said.

Fear is mounting amongst Afghans and foreign governments alike that the planned pullout of most NATO combat troops by the end of 2014 and Afghan national elections in the same year could see the country engulfed in more conflict.

"You see suddenly people are rushing to opium and cannabis as in the euro zone we were rushing to the Swiss franc before the euro," Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, told Reuters in an interview.

"It is hedging for a very insecure future indeed, it's basically an economic reflex, understandable by itself, toward a very insecure question mark, what will I be, where will I be, how will I be and my family too," he said.

Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world's opium, from which heroin is made. Corruption also infects many aspects of life and the buoyant drug trade flourishes.

The poppy economy in Afghanistan, which provides an income for insurgents, grew significantly in 2011 with soaring prices and expanded cultivation, according to a U.N. report.

In 2011, the farm-gate value of opium production more than doubled from the year previously to $1.4 billion and now accounts for 15 percent of the economy, the UNODC said.

Despite a recovery in the poppy crop after an outbreak of disease in 2010, opium prices remain high even as supplies increase without a rise in demand because Afghans throughout the drug supply chain fret over future stability, Lemahieu said.

"A lot of people were buying the opium and the cannabis as a kind of gold standard, as a kind of security, financial guarantee for a very insecure future," Lemahieu said.

"Wall Street principles are being applied by the Kandahar farmers every day," he said of one of Afghanistan's top poppy producing provinces.

With foreign combat forces leaving by end-2014, and with much of their cash and air power expected to go with them, the Afghan government will need more help fighting poppy cultivation, experts say.

Afghanistan holds national elections in 2014 but President Hamid Karzai is barred from standing again, upping the stakes for political elites vying for power in a society riven by ethnic divisions and myriad feuds.

That uncertainty will help fuel an expected increase in opium production over the coming years as people seeking to influence politics scramble for more cash to fund patronage networks, Lemahieu said.

"The unclear political transition post 2014 is a major driver for an increase of the informal, illicit economy, in which the narco industry forms an essential part," he said.

"That insecurity, that instability, that uneasiness with this big question mark post 2014 is driving so many people towards making sure that they have the war chests filled, because we just don't know what the future is to bring."

(Editing by Alison Williams)