Opium Nation Page 13

  “This route [Ghoryan to Iran] has belonged to smugglers since Afghanistan’s history,” he tells me. “It’s not a shame or a crime. People here do it because they are hungry.”

  Inside his spotless seven-bedroom house, the whispers of his wives and extended family echo from behind closed doors. Jasmine incense burns in the large living room. Sardar sits cross-legged spitting tobacco juice into a decorated container on the gleaming Persian carpet, next to his adopted daughter, Sepida, ten, who sports sunglasses. Behind them are half a dozen vases with colorful artificial flowers. In the middle of the vases is a fourteen-inch framed photograph of Sardar in his younger years, without the beard, turban, or wrinkles he has now.

  Sardar says he has everything in life he could want, except for children. He has three young wives and, under Afghan law, which is based on Islam, is allowed to marry one more, but instead he has decided to travel to Pakistan for fertility treatments. He says his family made their money from sheepherding and money changing. They have a currency trade in the town’s main market, which serves as a front for their drug business, according to locals. Sardar says his fortune amounts to only $20,000. He has not had any problems with any change of government—he was friends with the Taliban and now he’s friends with the new coalition-backed government. “I’m illiterate and do not interfere in politics,” he says. “My family’s able to adapt to government changes.”

  I snap a few photos of Haji Sardar and his adopted daughter, Sepida, his slain brother’s child. She and Sardar sit next to each other, both with legs crossed, their hands on their laps. Sepida leaves on her purple sunglasses while Sardar tilts his head to the side. They both look at the camera with straight faces. Sepida wears a hint of a smile. Then I ask politely if I can meet Sardar’s wives. He dithers but agrees. A confident second-grader, Sepida waltzes over to the marble-floored kitchen and introduces me to the women of the house. A dozen women huddle behind the tiled kitchen counters, eyeing me. The three wives come forward; they are light skinned with light eyes, all from his Badorzi tribe. Their faces are made up like China dolls: the foundation is lighter than their skin, their green and blue eye shadow is applied beyond the boundaries of their eyes, and their lipstick is glossy and thick. They wear tomban, the loose white hand-embroidered pants afforded only by wealthy city women. The fine silk embroidery of the pants is done best by the women of Herat and Kandahar. I wear the two white tombans I own under dresses on special occasions. These women seem to wear them on a routine day. I smile at them, and they return the gesture.

  “You have a beautiful house,” I tell them. “You’re very lucky, because most people here cannot live in homes like this.”

  “Thank you. Chishma shama maqboola [your eyes are beautiful],” one of the women responds. “Your eyes are beautiful” is a Farsi response to a compliment from a woman.

  “How can you afford all this?” I ask.

  I do not know that Sardar has been standing behind the doorway listening. As soon as I ask this question, he appears and interrupts the conversation.

  “It’s getting late, and they have guests coming. They have to get ready for them,” he tells me. “Go away!” he commands them.

  Later that day, Saber and I are talking to a shopkeeper on the main road when a large, shiny motorcycle races toward us and suddenly brakes. It’s Sardar, wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket, his black turban wrapped tightly. He resembles the villains in Bollywood films. He climbs off the vehicle and commands Saber, “Where’s the camera she took pictures with in my house? I want her to erase the pictures of us. Now!”

  He ignores me, but before Saber can respond, I take out the camera from my purse and give it to him. It’s a thirty-five-millimeter Canon, but Sardar thinks it’s a digital and looks for the screen to view the images.

  “There’s film in there,” I say.

  “Take it out! I want to see it,” he hollers.

  “Haji Sahib, why are you so upset?” Saber says, trying to calm him. “She’s not going to do anything bad with the pictures.”

  “I don’t want my photos in any newspapers in America or Europe,” Sardar explains.

  “But I have many other photos and if you take out the film, it will destroy everything. Do you want to be responsible for destroying all my photos?” I ask. “I’ll make you copies of your photos when I develop the film.”

  Sardar hands me back the camera. He’s not happy, but he appears reluctant to push me further. He turns to Saber again. “If my photos are published, somebody will pay for it.”

  I choose not to mention the widow Gandomi to Sardar, because it might hurt her more if he is aware that I know he is intimidating her. I have no power in Ghoryan, despite the impression the residents seem to have of me. They think I can help them merely because I come from the United States.

  Across the street, a retired smuggler named Zikria is watching the incident with Sardar with keen interest. As Sardar speeds away, Zikria walks over to us to inquire. “I can tell you all about drug smuggling, if you’d like,” he offers. “It was my occupation not too long ago. Come over to my house when you’d like.”

  Later, at home, Saber tells me about Zikria. “He was one of the biggest smugglers in all of Afghanistan not too long ago.”

  “Why did he quit?” I ask.

  “I guess he was losing money like the others. Now his family’s into robbing jewelry stores and currency exchanges. But he’s easy to talk to,” he says reassuringly, “so let’s pay him a visit.”

  When we visit Zikria’s large, untidy house, his ten-year-old son, Cyrus, greets us and takes us over to his father, relaxing on a large carpet-covered cushion. Zikria is a jovial businessman, cracking jokes and smoking a cigarette. A mass of black curls frames his expressive face. He’s about six feet tall and thirty-two years old.

  In the 1990s, Zikria loaded up ten men, each armed with a Kalashnikov, in his Nissan truck and headed for the Iranian mountains carrying hundreds of kilos of opium. Of the twenty-one of his closest trafficking allies in Ghoryan, he is the only who is still free and alive.

  Zikria’s foray into the drug business began with his desire for a woman. The maverick wanted to marry a second wife. The father of the girl he chose asked for a $14,000 bride price, and the opium trade was the fastest way for Zikria to get it.

  “I borrowed fifteen hundred kilos of opium from farmers in the south and took it to Iran. In two instances other traffickers shot at us from afar, and I turned onto unmarked trails to lose the gunmen. Many traffickers die in battles with other smugglers wanting to steal their dope, arms, or money. Our crew reached the mountain where the opium was to be unloaded, buried it underground, and hid our vehicle behind trees. It took thirty days before our Iranian contact appeared at the bottom of the mountain.

  “Iranian shepherds deliver messages between Afghan vendors and Iranian buyers, and, in return, take a cut of opium from both sides. The same shepherds serve as informants to the Iranian government.”

  Zikria considers himself lucky. He made it back to present the $14,000 to the girl’s father and married her. His son, Cyrus, is the offspring of that marriage—he sits next to his father, proudly listening.

  “How do you survive now?” I ask Zikria.

  “We sell legal things,” he answers, bored with the question. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

  While Sardar’s active dealing as a drug lord caused him to be distant and distrustful toward me, Zikria’s retirement from drugs allows him to open up and divulge information. While Sardar is nouveau riche, with flashy taste in home decoration, Zikria shows a more urban flavor in clothes and décor. He doesn’t flaunt his wealth. But both men display the typical lifestyle of an Afghan smuggler: the multiple wives, the large homes. They’re both criminals who should be prosecuted, but instead they punish the innocent with their crimes.

  With a 40 percent unemployment rate, drug smuggling is the best paying and most available job in Afghanistan. An American DEA agent who has worked in Afgh
anistan puts the chain of the narcotics link in this order: farmers–broker–trafficker–transporter, (courier/smuggler)–processor–broker–transporter, (courier/smuggler)–distributor–dealer. “The drug business model is very fluid, and any one of these functions may be skipped or combined, with a trafficker operating as his own broker or a transporter also being a distributor. Interestingly, marijuana dispensaries in California combine all of these functions into one-stop shopping,” he says.

  There are few codes to communicate with or rules to engage in—it’s not a corporation—but it is managed by money. The currency exchanged between drug vendors is U.S. dollars, and they deal in crisp $100 bills. Drug trafficking is mixed with weapons smuggling: drugs are exported, and arms made with drug money are imported on all sides of the Afghan border. American troops have seized Iranian-made weapons used by the Taliban several times. NATO officials tell me that the Taliban exchange drugs for weapons with corrupt Revolutionary Guard soldiers, an elite branch of Iran’s military. In a bazaar in Tajikistan bordering the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan, merchants trade heroin for guns. The weapons are disassembled and smuggled into Afghanistan on donkeys. “We trade a kilogram of heroin for ten Kalakovs or fifteen [old-model] Kalashnikovs,” a trader told a journalist from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2008. “After that, we sell them to smugglers from Helmand and Kandahar either for cash or for more heroin.” But the Taliban are not the only ones who buy the weapons. Aminullah Amarkhil, the former head of security at Kabul Airport, told an Australian journalist that he had caught American private contractors smuggling weapons parts in their luggage.

  Tribes with ties to the Taliban tend to be in charge of border control in the east and south. Traffickers pay the Taliban to protect their drug convoys, and in some cases the Taliban are the traffickers. But in the north, it’s a free-for-all—drugs are simply a business that Taliban sympathizers, government officials, the police, and merchants all take part in, and control rests with the particular mafia ruling the area. About 65 percent of opium is processed into a morphine base or heroin inside Afghanistan; the rest may be raw opium. Iran is the quickest route to Europe, with 50 percent of the drug smuggled through Iran, but large quantities leave also through the northern and Pakistan borders. Morphine base and raw opium may also be transported to Turkey, where established illegal laboratories refine them into injectable heroin.

  Russian authorities report that 175 drug syndicates, or mafias, operate from Afghanistan, including Russian mafias. Internationally, the Pakistani-based Quetta Alliance, which involves the Pakistani truckers who smuggle all types of goods across borders, is closest to the Taliban. Firms owned and operated by the Pakistani military are linked to the Quetta Alliance. The DEA says the Quetta Alliance is responsible for large shipments of heroin and morphine base to Europe and the United States. Nigerian drug trafficking organizations also move Afghan drugs to West African syndicates inside the United States, who then team up with African-American gangs to supply consumers. Experienced Turkish organized crime groups include the Uzan group, led by Turkish businessman/politician Cem Uzan, and the Britain-based Arifs, who run Afghan opiates to Europe. Albanian mafias are also connected to the Afghan heroin trail. And as India has become a more popular transit route for drugs, Dawood Ibrahim, the Indian crime boss, has dabbled in Afghan heroin deals. Domestically, Afghan mafia groups include the Afridis and Shinwaris, working in eastern Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. The United States and Great Britain have had success in removing several Afghan kingpins, including Haji Bashir Noorzai, Haji Juma Khan, Haji Bagcho, and Haji Baz Mohammad, but their networks still operate.

  During the Taliban years and in the beginning of Karzai’s rule, narcotics were exported from Kabul Airport to the Arab Gulf on commercial flights. Gulf Arabs are prominent investors in Afghan drugs, and wealthy Afghan and Pakistani drug dealers maintain lavish homes in the United Arab Emirates. According to the New York Times, $1 billion to $2.5 billion a year is transferred from Afghanistan to the UAE. Before U.S. intervention, investors flew in on Afghan Ariana Airlines to meet with the Taliban and flew out on the same planes with boxes stashed with narcotics. The planes landed in UAE airports with impunity. After Amarkhil was hired in 2005, better technology and police work allowed him to capture more than one hundred heroin traffickers en route to Dubai. The arrests prompted smugglers to begin ingesting the drugs in protected capsules and to change their destination to Urumqi, China. Amarkhil says he did not have an X-ray machine but could recognize drug mules by their dry lips and dehydrated state. Mules often look drugged, managing as they do up to one hundred white capsules the size of a hot dog and filled with fifty to a hundred grams of narcotics. They carry exactly $1,000 with them and have dozens of visas stamped on their passports. Once Amarkhil detained the mules, he either got a confession from them or sent them to a clinic that was equipped with an X-ray machine. One Pakistani man Amarkhil caught at the airport admitted to carrying 111 capsules in his bowel. The man also carried hair oil, to help him excrete the contents when he reached China.

  Unfortunately, Amarkhil was too good at his job. After nabbing a powerful woman smuggler with connections to the government, the Afghan attorney general fired him.

  Large and organized drug cartels like those in Latin America and Southeast Asia are not common in Afghanistan. The country is still ruled by community links, which protect ordinary people. No one drug baron controls more than a three-hundred-kilometer stretch of road. There aren’t death squads roaming the country—not yet anyway. But with its combination of a weak and corrupt central government, a shattered economy, and an insurgency that benefits from narcotics trafficking, Afghanistan is an incubator for drug cartels.

  The wealthy drug merchants launder opium cash inside and outside the country in a variety of businesses, including real estate, construction projects, car dealerships, and currency exchanges. If the opium business suddenly closed down—an unlikely scenario—Afghanistan would suffer immeasurable economic consequences.

  Zikria and Sardar are the experienced smugglers in the chain, but I want to meet the younger generation of drug dealers, to see how a young man or woman becomes involved in such a deadly job. When I ask Saber to find an amateur dealer, he points to our driver that day, Jalal. Limber and lanky, Jalal is a small-time dealer new to the business. He’s eighteen, with cropped hair, a straight nose, and a clean-shaven face. Eager to show his fearlessness, he explains how he’s just benefited from his first year of opium harvest. He learned from the Taliban how to turn his wheat and watermelon fields into poppy blossoms. His family’s harvest in Ghoryan yielded twenty kilos of raw opium.

  “My father asked me if I wanted a wife and a car,” Jalal says on one of our long drives. “I said I want two cars. I now transport passengers for twenty dollars round trip from Ghoryan to Herat city. I had nothing, not even a bicycle last year. Now I feel rich and I have a job.”

  His long, thin fingers tap on the steering wheel while we listen to Iranian pop. He leaves all the windows of his station wagon open and frequently sticks out his arm to wave at people we pass by. Jalal says his best friend also began dealing drugs recently. On the way to his best friend’s house, Jalal stops to salute a group of men on the street. One offers him eight kilos of opium for his car. Jalal eyes the station wagon’s steering wheel like a five-year-old boy with a new toy. “I just got this and I can’t give it up for less than ten kilos. Let’s talk later,” he says, accelerating.

  Jalal’s best friend is Tarek, a chubby mustachioed twenty-three-year-old who manages dozens of acres of land belonging to families living outside the country. A year ago he planted opium on that land and now has enough money for his wedding. He bought a brand-new Honda motorcycle and painted his concrete house white.

  Chatting inside his newly painted house, Tarek brings out his fresh batch of black opium, a bitter, gooey liquid. “If you sell, you don’t use it. We have people test to see if it’s pure or not. They’re
addicts,” Tarek says, tying the plastic bag filled with half a kilo of the treasure and hiding it away.

  Jalal and Tarek say they are taking part in a Ghoryan tradition, but unless they are desperate, they will not cross the border with drugs. “We deal here and hire the shepherds as our fall guys. This is the only way to stay alive and become rich,” Jalal says, his smile turning smug.

  We exit the house. Saber and I decide to walk the several blocks to his house. Jalal leaves the station wagon parked inside Tarek’s yard and says he’ll meet us later if we need him. Like two eagles taking off from a mountaintop, the best friends ride off on Tarek’s motorcycle, leaving a trail of dust.

  These two young men like the new government, since they have the contacts in it that others do not. Jalal says the district government sends a six-member commission in the fall to view the cultivated land and asks for a kilo per half an acre. In exchange, the government does not destroy the crops. One hazy morning, Saber, Jalal, and I visit the police intelligence unit in Ghoryan. The assistant intelligence director gets up to welcome us and then directs his attention toward Jalal. “I’m upset with your father,” the bearded official says. “He didn’t give me my share. I expect that share.”

  “I think my father gave enough this year,” Jalal replies under his breath. It’s obvious they’re talking about the official’s share of the opium profits. The conversation comes to a halt when Mohammad Sobhan, the intelligence chief of Ghoryan, arrives. He offers to show me videos of the government destroying opium crops. I politely decline.

  “I’d actually like to know how you capture smugglers and how many smugglers are jailed right now?”

  “Very few,” Sobhan says.

  “How many are in the local jail right now?”