Opium Nation Read online

  “The girls being sold off to pay opium debts. These cowardly smugglers will sell their daughters at young ages to save themselves. It takes away any honor we have,” he says, his voice rising.

  Families normally ask a bride price for their daughters. It took Saber a few years digging dozens of wells before he could pay the $2,000 dowry Tarana’s family requested. But Saber explains that normal bride prices are different from bartered opium brides. In normal arrangements, “you marry the daughter to someone you know and trust. These smugglers are settling a business deal with dangerous criminals.”

  “Do you know anybody we can talk to?”

  “There are a lot of families. Few would talk about it. They’re ashamed. But I’ll find you one.”

  The next day, Saber finds a family willing to talk because the father has gone missing. The mother is in charge and financially desperate.

  “I told her you might be able to help her,” Saber says.

  “Don’t make such promises,” I warn him. “I can only help by telling their story, and other people who read or hear the story can give money if they want.”

  The drive to the family’s home is a ten-minute rattling ride along the dry Ghoryan River. The white station wagon Saber has hired stops next to a tiny alleyway with high walls. Saber knocks on one of the doors, and he and the driver, Jalal, remain outside out of respect for the women. Men are not supposed to enter homes if the male host is not present.

  A smiling little girl with a brown bob opens the door. She doesn’t say a word. She points to an older woman carrying a toddler. The woman wears a yellowish-brown lace dress with an untied pink floral head scarf. She looks about forty-five years old, but I know she’s younger—most rural Afghan women look older than their age. Her laugh lines frame her mouth, and bunched wrinkles hide her tired eyes. The skin on her hands is coarse and cracked. She’s thin, so much so that her lace dress hangs limply.

  “Salaam,” she greets me, looking me over with curiosity and suspicion. “Please come this way.” She leads me up a porch and into a hallway. She points for me to take a seat on a ripped, aging carpet there. A dozen children from the neighborhood crowd around me, including the children who live in this house. The woman shoos away the curious neighborhood children and orders one of her daughters to bring tea.

  After a minute of polite greetings, she introduces herself as Basira and points to her six children, four girls and two boys. One of the girls, fair-skinned with light brown locks falling over her forehead through her blue head scarf, brings me green tea. I note her dirt-caked fingernails. “This is Darya,” the girl’s mother tells me. “She’s twelve, but no one believes that, because she’s blooming so fast. She doesn’t have her period yet.”

  Darya’s dark green eyes dart to the floor. Basira’s mention of a period embarrasses her. She is about five feet tall, with a playful gait. Her curves are evident under her long green dress and matching pants. Her head scarf is loosely tied, but she keeps it on skillfully as she serves her guest.

  “Salaam, Darya Jan. Ishtani? [How are you?] Do you go to school?” I ask the girl.

  “I’m in the second grade,” she answers, smiling through yellowed teeth. At age twelve, she should be in the sixth grade, but since the Taliban forbade girls from attending school for six years, Darya fell behind. She has now joined the 4.8 million children in elementary school, 37 percent of them girls, the highest ratio of girls attending school in the country’s history.

  “She’s a smart girl, a bit rebellious,” Basira informs me. “I wish I could keep her, but she’ll be leaving to be with her husband.”

  Darya slams the silver tray with my finished tea glass and looks up at her mother angrily. “He’s not my husband and I’m not going anywhere. Why do you keep talking about it?” She storms off to the kitchen.

  Basira ignores this outburst. “My oldest child is Saboora; she’s fourteen. But she will stay with me. The man her father sold her to has not shown up.”

  Saboora stands at the corner of the hall, her arms folded against her chest. She resembles her sister but she’s taller and has light brown eyes. She has been looking at me with disdain, not smiling, not speaking. I hear her whisper to an older woman next to her, “Why is my mother talking to her? This is our private information.”

  I change the subject to ease the girl’s discomfort. “Is this your house?” I ask Basira.

  The house’s structure is similar to Zamir Agha’s home, but it is much smaller, dirtier, and older. The outhouse does not have a door, a makeshift piece of wood is placed in front of a hole in the wall, and there’s a small water well next to a kitchen blackened by soot. Basira and her children occupy two of the rooms.

  “It’s my cousin’s house,” Basira says. “He’s in Iran, and we can stay here until he comes back. The clay oven and well are shared by the neighbors. We don’t own anything,” she adds bitterly, “except these rags we’re wearing.”

  Hana, the one-year-old in her lap, a girl with sun-bleached hair and greenish-blue eyes, tugs on her mother’s dress. Basira nurses her and lights the water pipe. Between sucks of tobacco and the sound of gurgling bubbles, Basira begins to tell me her story. Her face is slack and nearly all her teeth are gone. She speaks with fatalistic absolutism. “Life and God have cursed me,” she says. Her words are sparse, her expressions unreadable. “I lose my temper whenever the children fight or scream. I can’t control them,” she says. Her oldest son, Yama, refuses to attend school. Darya doesn’t do her chores and instead plays in the sand barefoot with the unseemly neighborhood kids. Basira resorts to violence to control them. She hits them with a two-foot-long wooden stick she keeps on a windowsill.

  The thirty-year-old Basira is half Pashtun, half Tajik, a mix that is common in this part of the country. Neither she nor her children speak any Pashto. Basira’s family members are sheepherders, but her maternal uncle, Ali, is a high school teacher, and the only male figure present in this family. Twenty years ago he taught in Kabul, and when Basira came to visit with her parents, he tried to convince them to let her stay and attend school there. At that point she’d studied up to the fifth grade in Ghoryan and could read and write. But her parents politely refused the invitation and brought her back to Herat, and at age fifteen she was married to Touraj, whose family were also shepherds.

  “My life may have been completely different if I had stayed with my uncle,” she says.

  Basira became pregnant with Saboora a year later, and every two years, she had another child—except for Hana, who came four years after Asifa, now five. Hana was not planned. Darya was born in 1990, near the end of Communist rule. The family stayed on in Ghoryan, enduring the war. Basira and Touraj led a humble but happy life. They lived with his family. She tended to her housework and children while he worked skinning sheep. Their family had no connection to the opium business.

  Then, in 1995, the Taliban seized Herat from Ismail Khan. Just when Saboora, then seven, was to enroll in the first grade, the schools for girls were closed. A drought killed livestock and dried up the Ghoryan River, one of the few sources of water in this desert, and farmers began cultivating opium. Before the Taliban, poppy production occurred in southern, eastern, and some northern provinces, while Herat served as the trafficking route. After the rise of the Taliban, the district was transformed from merely a trafficking route into a producer of the drug as well. The Taliban’s main income was the illicit narcotics trade—in 1999 they made between $25 million and $75 million just from taxing opium farmers and traffickers.

  The Taliban ensured that farmers in Herat learned the skills necessary to farm poppy, sending experienced farmers from Helmand and Kandahar to teach Ghoryan farmers how to convert from traditional crops to poppy. Poppy is a resilient crop that grows in almost any climate and takes little water to ripen. Ghoryan farmers learned fast, especially since, for the first time, the practice was now legal and profits were ten times more than those for wheat, which is the most cultivated crop in Afghanistan
.

  The Taliban also encouraged unemployed young men in villages on the borders such as Ghoryan to become involved in the labyrinthine trade. The men became couriers, the trade’s most dangerous job. Drug lords and smugglers who do not want to cross the border regularly hire couriers. These mules may carry a knife or an AK-47 for protection, but they’re no match for the big traffickers, who are armed with RPGs and machine guns and riding in Toyota trucks whizzing across the desert. Couriers can die in the crossfire between the more powerful competing smugglers or from the bullets of Iranian border guards, who shoot to kill anyone attempting an illegal border crossing. The desert frontier is a battle zone, with no demarcations of alliance and loyalties. When one group of drug bandits feels threatened, they shoot, and the other smugglers on the road fire back. If Iran catches the couriers or smugglers alive, the men languish in Iranian prisons, where some are hanged. According to Afghan Parliament member Gul Ahmad Amini, who went on a fact-finding mission to Iran in 2010, as many as 5,630 Afghans are currently in Iranian prisons, with more than 3,000 sentenced to death. The majority of those on death row are alleged drug traffickers. Iranian officials say the number is much lower, but they refuse to disclose the exact number of Afghan men who will be executed for drug crimes. Iranian law states that if an individual is caught three times with as little as half a kilo to as much as twenty kilos of opiates, he or she may receive the death penalty. But some of the Afghan inmates on death row say they haven’t even had trials.

  In Ghoryan, the numbers do not matter. The line of graves in Ghoryan cemeteries with an Afghan flag flying over them reveals the truth.

  Basira’s husband, Touraj, was not familiar with the cruelty of the drug trade when he decided to become a dealer. The drought all but ended work in sheepherding for him and his extended family, and with several children and a wife to feed, he was forced to find a new job to support his family. It didn’t take long for Touraj, thirty-five, to become friendly with influential smugglers and the Taliban. He began recruiting couriers. He made a small fortune buying opium and hiring and training couriers to smuggle drugs. Like most successful drug dealers in Afghanistan, Touraj also opened a currency exchange business. He became a saraf—the word means “money changer,” but in border towns such as Ghoryan, it also implies “drug dealer.” It’s one way to launder drug money.

  Touraj’s lifestyle and appearance changed with his burgeoning profits. He wore a Rodo watch, a sign of wealth in Afghanistan, and a gold ring that opened up to sport another smaller watch. In a matter of five years, he built a blue-tile, two-story home on an acre of land that still shines on a street among mud-brick shacks.

  Basira and her daughters say little about the marble-floored, ten-room house with the rose garden. They rarely mention the kilos of gold jewelry that hung from Basira’s neck and ears. They try not to recall their motorcycle parked in the driveway. But everybody else in Ghoryan remembers them well.

  “They were the envy of this town,” Saber’s mother, Amina, says. “Few here had that kind of wealth.”

  Basira did not ask many questions when Touraj was making money. She liked being rich for once and did not mind the gold he bought her. She wore makeup and dressed in glitter-embossed velvet dresses, and she made sure the house was clean and the foods Touraj liked were prepared when he arrived for dinner. The trouble came when he decided to marry a second wife.

  Basira did not approve of the marriage but had no power to stop it. Touraj wed Azin, a young girl from Herat city, and wanted to make her feel like the world was hers. On their wedding day, he decorated almost every Toyota Land Cruiser in town with fresh flowers. With the couple in front, the procession of motorcycles and cars circled the bombed-out roads of Ghoryan as guests fired rounds of bullets into the sky to celebrate. Azin moved into the blue-tile house with Basira and had two children with Touraj. Basira’s attitude toward her husband changed. She no longer made his favorite meals or flirted with him when he came home from work.

  Opium wealth for Touraj was as fleeting as the drug’s high. He continued to work in the trade, but the four thousand tons of poppy produced in Afghanistan in 1999 oversupplied the market and slowed business. The Taliban’s ban on opium production in 2000 raised opium prices again, but it was too late for Touraj. He stopped benefiting from the trade and quickly went into debt when Iran seized six of his drug caravans. He now owed about $10,000 to smugglers from Helmand.

  When he traveled to Helmand to settle his debt, the drug barons held a gun to his head and threw him in jail several times, demanding their money. Touraj offered his most prized possessions: his two oldest daughters. Their fair skin and curvaceous figures made the girls worth thousands of dollars. But even with the sale of his daughters, he still owed money.

  In 2002 he went into hiding, leaving Basira pregnant with Hana. He was constantly on the run. Siar Agha, one of Basira’s neighbors, an elderly man with a white beard and turban, enters the hallway and joins my conversation with Basira.

  “One day I was sitting with my wife having tea in our yard and he jumped over the wall,” the man tells me. “Touraj looked disheveled and frightened. He asked if we could give him shelter because the drug barons were out to kill him. We didn’t know him that well, but we made sure he was taken care of for a few days. Then he took off again, and we don’t know where he went.”

  The drug barons came to the blue-tile house, knocking down the doors. They gave Touraj’s wives a few hours to pack up. They took the house and everything in it—the Persian carpets, the gold, the motorcycle, and the generator. Touraj’s second wife, Azin, moved with her two children back to the city, where she lives with her parents. Some of their old neighbors say they see Touraj once in a while, in the crowded markets in Herat city skinning sheep, his old job.

  Basira and her children became homeless, moving from one relative’s house to another. Her uncle Ali told her to abort her sixth child, but she refused. “Instead she tried to kill herself, and we stopped her,” Ali says. “We tried to help with the kids, because they’re out of her control.”

  Basira serves others now, making a sporadic daily fifty cents baking bread or washing clothes. The family barely has enough to eat. They have two outfits each, a pair of shoes, and several head scarves.

  Darya goes to the kitchen to make more tea. I ask Basira if I can take some photos of Darya, and she shrugs. “It’s fine as long as she has her hijab on,” Basira answers. Darya holds her baby sister Hana in one hand, opens a can of Chinese green tea, and sprinkles loose leaves into a shiny silver-colored teapot. She picks up one of the large steel kettles boiling on the baked-mud stove lit up with charcoal and pours in the boiling water.

  I put the camera away and walk back to where Basira is smoking her water pipe.

  Malik, Saboora’s husband, has not shown up to claim the girl. Basira is too afraid to wed Saboora to another man, in case Malik appears. But Darya’s husband, Haji Sufi, has come from Helmand—several hundred miles from Ghoryan—several times with gifts in the last two years to take her away. Basira says Darya does not want to be married. She is a young girl who is ecstatic that she can go to school after six years at home during the Taliban regime. But when her husband arrives, this carefree girl morphs into a raging, terrified child. Her mother tries to convince her to go with him. Basira is so destitute that she wants the entire family to become the husband’s servants. But Darya refuses. He’s thirty-four years older than she, does not speak Farsi, and has another wife and eight children. When he arrives, Darya curses him and runs away from him.

  “She’s lucky he’s not forcing her to go. Next time he comes, she’s going to have to go, because I’m afraid of what he might do to the rest of us if she doesn’t.”

  Basira stops chugging on the water pipe. She looks me in the eye and tells me life seems cliché to her, from riches to rags. “I only live hour by hour,” she says, “wondering when the next meal is coming from, when are the smugglers going to take my daughters, is my husband ever
going to come home? We have peace now, but what good is this peace when my family may go hungry tomorrow?”

  I thank her and promise to return and speak to her more. At Saber’s home, I share Basira’s story during a dinner of tasty okra and potatoes. Saber’s mother, Amina, blames all of Basira’s troubles on the greediness of men, be it with money or wives. “One of the first things men in Ghoryan do when they make some extra money is marry another wife,” she says. “If they have two, they’ll marry three, and if they have three, then it’s four. Some of the bigger smugglers don’t respect the four wives allowed in Islam. They’ll marry six, seven wives.”

  “They want a harem,” Saber adds.

  Girls want the choice to refuse marriage to these men. Darya is in the majority. More than 60 percent of Afghan girls face forced marriages. Most of them comply—they are young girls, after all—but Darya is putting up a significant fight.

  Chapter Six

  A Smuggling Tradition

  I watch the sun set on the porch of Saber’s house and think back to Mr. Jawan’s days of smuggling. The stories of the past weigh less on the heart—I prefer those to the ones I hear today. Most of my relatives in Herat met our neighbor Mr. Jawan when they came to our Behzad Road home. Mr. Jawan visited my father on the weekends and had dinner with us. He invited the children and adults to sit around him and listen to his stories. My maternal and paternal aunts and uncles were fond of him. The gregarious smuggler was willing to help any of them, anytime, especially if it involved traveling to Iran.

  Uncle Rostam was eighteen and wanted to go on vacation to Iran with his cousin Tahir. He did not want to go through the hassle of getting a visa and paying for the trip, so he turned for help to Mr. Jawan, who could easily smuggle out people as well as drugs. But Uncle Rostam wasn’t aware that Mr. Jawan also needed his help.