U.S. Fears a Glut of Heroin From a Volatile Afghanistan
By TIM GOLDEN
April 1, 2002
American officials have quietly abandoned their hopes to reduce Afghanistan's opium production substantially this year and are now bracing for a harvest large enough to inundate the world's heroin and opium markets with cheap drugs.
While American and European officials have debated such measures as paying Afghan opium farmers to plow under their fields, they have concluded that continuing lawlessness and political instability will make eradication all but impossible.
Instead, United States officials will pursue a less ambitious strategy: They have begun trying to persuade Afghan leaders to carry out a modest destruction program as opium poppies are harvested over the next two months, if only to show they were serious last January in declaring a ban on production.
The Americans will also encourage destruction of opium-processing laboratories and a crackdown on brokers, while providing funds to strengthen antisumggling activities by neighboring countries. The campaign is being strongly backed and even to some extent led by Britain, which traces nearly all heroin on its streets to Afghanistan.
But the continuing upheaval in and around Afghanistan will limit the effectiveness of those strategies, American and British officials admit, making it likely that Afghanistan will produce enough opium to dominate the world supply again.
''The fact is, there are no institutions in large parts of the country,'' the Bush administration's drug policy director, John P. Walters, said in an interview. ''What we can do will be extremely limited.''
Until leaders of the Taliban banned opium in their last year in power, Afghanistan produced as much as three-fourths of the world's supply, and taxes on the drug trade were an important source of revenue for the Taliban. Now, the profits that flowed to the Taliban's allies are expected to enrich tribal leaders whose support is vital to the American-backed government.
So long as the drug trade flourishes, law-enforcement officials said, it will fuel political rivalries, foster corruption and undermine the authority of the central government. But because opium farming remains one of the few viable economic activities, officials added, any intense eradication effort could imperil the stability of the government and thus hamper the military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
''The fight against terrorism takes priority,'' one British law enforcement official said. ''The fight against narcotics comes in second.''
The challenge that American and European officials face is compounded by the surprising success the Taliban achieved in banning poppy cultivation two years ago.
That prohibition, which came after several years in which the Taliban quietly encouraged poppy farming, cut opium output from an estimated 4,042 tons in 2000, about 71 percent of the world's supply, to just 82 tons last year, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. What little opium Afghanistan produced in 2001 came almost entirely from the 10 percent of its territory then controlled by the Northern Alliance, the backbone of the new government.
But the decline left many small landowners and sharecroppers deep in debt. In the absence of a credit system, larger landholders customarily loan smaller farmers and laborers food, cooking oil or money for the winter, to be paid back after the harvest of opium gum. The landholders also offer fertilizer and seed in return for a portion of the crop.
Diplomats and relief officials say a considerable number of refugees fleeing into Pakistan were opium farmers who could not pay their debts. But as soon as the Taliban's military resistance began to crumble last fall, many other farmers rushed to plant opium again.
On Jan. 17, with strong encouragement from the United States and the United Nations, the chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration, Hamid Karzai, announced a new ban on opium cultivation. His prohibition went beyond the Taliban's decree, to include processing and trafficking, which the Taliban had tolerated and, to some extent, profited from.
While foreign officials have applauded Mr. Karzai's ban, it was issued only after the poppies had been planted and without any viable means of implementation.
''Chairman Karzai can put out a decree not to grow poppy, but it takes a law-enforcement component to enforce that decree,'' the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Asa Hutchinson, has told Congress.
Now, even though the opium was planted relatively late in the season and the fields will be affected by a continuing drought, drug-control officials say the conditions are good enough to produce a bumper crop.
''We had a brief opportunity to significantly impact their potential to produce opium,'' one senior American official involved in the effort said. ''We have lost that opportunity. What is going to occur is that this crop is going to get out of the ground.''
In a preliminary survey in February, the United Nations International Drug Control Program estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields could reach between 111,000 acres and 161,000 acres, an area about the size of that cultivated in the mid-1990's but much less than its peak of 224,918 acres, which was planted in the fall of 1999 and harvested the next year.
While it will be impossible to determine the size of the crop until the poppies bloom and are harvested over the next two months, some United States estimates are of a crop even larger than that projected by the United Nations.
''What is scary about this is that it really could give them enough opium to stockpile for two or two and a half more years,'' the senior American official said.
Afghanistan's record harvest in 2000 was so large that opium dealers and traffickers were able to set aside huge amounts of the drug, keeping heroin prices remarkably stable in countries like Britain and Germany even when the world supply plummeted the next year because of the Afghans' ban. Even now, United Nations officials say, those stockpiles hold enough opium to supply customers in Europe, Central Asia and other countries of the former Soviet Union for perhaps another year.
Initially, United States and European officials considered trying to buy up this year's harvest and then destroying it. That proposal was quickly abandoned, however, after objections from Germany, Italy and Scandinavian countries that it would only encourage the farmers to plant poppies again next year.
A second proposal was to pay opium farmers to plow under their fields. While that strategy has also drawn objections from some European countries, American officials said they would readily try it if they could find people who could move safely around the countryside, make deals with opium farmers and then assure that pledges to eradicate are fulfilled.
The possibilities included using relief workers to negotiate with the farmers and American soldiers to provide security, but officials said those ideas had been rejected.
Germany has taken responsibility for helping to train and equip a new Afghan police force, but officials expect that it will take five years or more before such a force can operate effectively across the country. A drug-enforcement unit in the Afghan Interior Ministry could be up and running much sooner, officials said, but not soon enough to act against this year's harvest.
In the meantime, American and especially British officials are pushing the government to negotiate some modest eradication plans with Pashtun tribal leaders and other local authorities in the important growing areas. Two officials said intelligence officers from both countries would support those efforts with cash and other incentives for local leaders who could persuade farmers to plow under their opium fields.
Ultimately, their success will depend on the Afghan governent, which is already struggling to win the loyalties of tribal leaders before the loya jirga, or national congress, convenes in June to choose a new government.
''Do they have the control to do this?'' asked Alex L. Jones, the program director in Afghanistan for Mercy Corps, a private relief group that has worked there for years, in a telephone interview from Kandahar. ''They depend on the various commanders, and the commanders depend on poppy growing -- whether because they get revenue from it directly or because they need the good will of the people who grow it.''
Foreign relief workers and development experts are already focused on the enormous task of establishing sustainable alternatives for poppy farmers before the next planting season begins in October.
Such efforts, which must fit into wider plans to revitalize the agricultural base, will require everything from seeds for fruit, cumin and other high-value crops to credit systems and new irrigation works and roads.
Bernard Frahi, the head of the United Nations control program for the region, said in a telephone interview from Pakistan, ''Things need to be done very, very soon in order for farmers not to plan opium next year.''