Opium Nation Page 14

  He shifts his legs and fidgets with the papers on his desk. “I’m not sure there are any, and if there are, they usually are released within a week.”

  “Why is that?” I insist.

  “We can’t be very hard on these guys, because we don’t have the manpower to fight them, or the weapons. They are much stronger than the government. We do not have a unified government in Herat. If we capture them, they get out with a bribe and then run to Zir Koh,” he admits. Zir Koh is a nearby district run by Ismail Khan’s rival, mujahideen commander Amanullah Khan. He is notorious for alleged drug running.

  Jalal is concerned about his father. After we’ve left the official’s office, he says, “When families don’t want to give a cut, the government eliminates their crop.”

  “Do you think that man will hurt your father?” I ask, referring to the official.

  “No, he doesn’t have the power, but he might destroy our crops next year. I’ll tell my father,” he replies with fake confidence.

  Ghoryan residents do not trust the government officials or the police. On a cool, star-filled night, a crowd gathers around a pyre of burning hashish at the Ghoryan fort. The stench is like skunk spray, mixed with the aroma of burning wood. The police chief has just weeded out some hashish plants from a local farm and is burning them in public to scare residents off from farming drugs. It is show and tell, and everyone seems to know it. One of the bystanders whispers to Saber, “They probably kept most of it hidden in the fort to sell later.”

  In Herat province in the summer of 2003, Ismail Khan was the warlord and self-proclaimed emir. He had an army of twenty thousand soldiers backed by Iran. Publicly, he condemned the drug trade and supported a treatment clinic for the booming number of addicts in western Afghanistan. But Khan prohibited the central Afghan antinarcotics office from opening a branch in his fiefdom, saying there was already a bureau operating under his control. Still, if he was reaping the benefits of opium trafficking, the evidence was hard to find.

  The question was how could he be so powerful without the support of drug traffickers? He may have been ignoring the men and mafia that could threaten his fiefdom, allowing them to do their business while he controlled most of the province. Despite the tight security in the region—Herat at this time was one of the most peaceful provinces in Afghanistan—big traffickers continued to cross from the Afghan side of the border into Iran.

  In 2004, Karzai forced Ismail Khan to give up his control of Herat with the help of American bombers. An aim of the Afghan central government was to exercise control over Herat and have access to the customs revenues Ismail Khan had spent developing the province. Karzai gave Ismail Khan the job of running the Ministry of Energy in Kabul, and Khan accepted. But after his departure, drug trafficking remained in place, if it didn’t increase, and the peace Heratis once enjoyed ended as robberies, kidnappings, and corruption skyrocketed. The violence slowed the pace of reconstruction. Khan’s absence from Herat allowed lower-ranking commanders to solidify their place in the drug trade and magnified the crimes associated with the business.

  Meanwhile, Iran tackled the low-level border war with a vengeance. It had lost more than 3,700 troops on the border fighting traffickers since 1979. With a growing addict population, the Iranian government was desperate to keep drugs out of the country. But it wasn’t just Afghans who were smuggling drugs. Double agents inside Iran’s intelligence agencies dabbled in drug dealing and betrayed their own comrades in the battle zone. After spending billions fighting the trade over the previous thirty years, Iran requested monetary aid from the United Nations, estimating that it would need another $3 billion to continue its battle in the next few years. With more than 100,000 troops stationed on the border, Iran also installed six hundred miles of barbed-wire fence, trench systems, canals, and cement barriers to stop the traffickers. Its border with Afghanistan stretched 575 miles, but the barbed-wire fence and canals extended into the Pakistan border. Iran also now used remote security surveillance and control systems to prevent the flow of narcotics. The results were impressive: in 2009, Iran seized a thousand tons of opium, 85 percent of the globe’s opium seizures. But the seizures, the executions of drug traffickers, and the billions spent did not stop the other tons of narcotic that crossed the border.

  In 2000, when I travel to Iran on my way to Herat, I have a guide in Tehran, Shahram, who helps me navigate the metropolis. His arrow-like eyebrows frame large brown eyes and he wears the same brown shirt and black slacks every time I see him. Shahram is a twenty-five-year-old civil servant who wants to get married but doesn’t have the money for a wedding. One day, we have a lunch of sandwiches with bologna and pickles on a bench in a quiet, pristine park in the upscale neighborhood of Vali Asr. After lunch, he lights up a hashish joint after making sure no police are on site and begins to lament about life in Tehran, a city of ten million.

  “I smoke because I’m bored and unhappy,” he says. “There are no jobs in this city to move one forward in life. I’m from the south of this city and we are middle class among the poor there. I’m lucky I have a government job, but I make seventy dollars a month.” He takes a slow drag of hashish, looks at the pink roses in front of us, and sighs.

  “What do you want to do that you can’t do?” I ask.

  “Be somebody—a doctor, an engineer, a musician—but I didn’t get accepted to university because my test scores were low and I don’t have any artistic skills. I have to help support my family, so I’m stuck in a dead-end job. The only job I can do to make more money is be a drug dealer.”

  “Do you know any other men your age who are doing that?”

  “Too many of the boys in my neighborhood do it, too many.”

  Later, in the basement of Shahram’s sparsely furnished home in southern Tehran, I meet two of his friends who are drug dealers. They tell me what happens to the Afghan drugs once they reach Iran.

  Mehdi, twenty-four, and Hassan, twenty, were both schooled in minor drug dealing on Tehran’s streets, though they both have other day jobs. They each have around twenty regular customers, ranging from laborers to doctors. They make about $100 to $200 a month—not much, considering the risks they take to avoid the police, but the job pays for their daily expenses. Like Shahram, they are both single and live with their parents. Both of them are high school graduates but cannot find steady work that makes more than drug dealing. Their illicit merchandise includes not only opium and heroin, but also vodka, cognac, hashish, and, for the wealthier customers, cocaine. Alcohol is prohibited in Iran and Afghanistan.

  Mehdi, a soft-spoken, thoughtful truck driver, plays with his mustache while he speaks. He says when he first started dealing several years ago, he would go to Mashad, the most populated Iranian city close to the Afghan border, load up his truck with bricks—the bricks were filled with opium and heroin—and then come to Tehran, distribute to smaller dealers, and keep some of the product for himself, to sell on the streets.

  “Where did you get the drugs?” I ask him.

  “There were the wholesale dealers who risk their lives to cross the border. They’re almost all Afghans. We bought from them, but our profit margin is nothing like it is when it goes to the West. People can’t afford that here.”

  He takes a piece of opium the size of a pill out of plastic wrap, saying, “This is the amount I normally sell now. It sells for about fifteen hundred toman [two dollars]. The profits are less, but so are the risks. We don’t have a set price. Profit depends on friendship—if the man is close to you, you give him a cheaper price.”

  A few years prior to our meeting, the Tehran police captured Mehdi for transporting large amounts of drugs. He spent three nights in jail and received forty lashes before being released. He was frightened enough to revert to small-time dealing inside Tehran.

  “I heard they hang Afghans. Are they easier on Iranian dealers?” I ask.

  “They hang Afghan smugglers. It all depends on how much you’re caught with and how many times. They’
ll hang Iranians, too, but Afghans have it much worse,” he admits.

  Hassan, a soldier, plays with the cast on his foot. He broke his foot jumping a fence. He says he has young boys, not even teenagers, who come up to him to buy but that he refuses to sell to children. He confesses that he smokes hashish three times a day because he has nothing to look forward to. “This life is it,” he says, sighing just like Shahram did.

  Mehdi and Hassan both explain why Iran has the biggest drug addiction problem in the world: a lack of jobs and freedom.

  “I think there’s too much freedom in America,” Mehdi says. “That’s why there’s a drug problem. And I think there is no freedom in Iran, and that’s why there’s a drug problem here.”

  “Are you ashamed of what you’re doing?” I ask both of them.

  Mehdi answers: “In this part of Tehran, in every family, there’s an addict and a dealer. In my family, my father’s the addict and I’m the dealer. Opium smoking is like cigarette smoking here.”

  “If we could find a job that pays more and lets us be our own bosses, we would give this up,” Hassan says.

  Mehdi, who at first defended his actions, looks down at the floor and scratches his mustache. “In a country where dignity is everything, we give up our dignity every day.”

  This cycle of poverty and unemployment leads to smuggling and drug use across the globe. Men and women in Afghanistan become smugglers because they cannot find alternative work, and the drugs they carry to Iran are sold and consumed by the unemployed and disillusioned. What is the difference between Jalal, the teenage Afghan smuggler, and the Iranian Hassan? Jalal lives in a village in one of the the world’s poorest countries consumed by drugs, and Hassan is a resident of a much wealthier and educated nation that is also consumed by drugs. Jalal is not an addict yet, but I wonder how long he will remain just a dealer.

  The frontier of Iran and Afghanistan is a two-hour drive from Ghoryan town, through minefields and over dirt roads. The length of the border where Ghoryan is situated cannot be crossed legally, because there are no customs officials or a border patrol. Saber knows a family in Gorgabad, a village right on the border. We hire a van with a young driver, Fawad, willing to risk his life with us across the wild desert. We depart at dawn headed against the sunrise; Iran is westward. Despite the thuds and thumps under the tires, I fall asleep.

  “Wake up, Fariba Jan. We’re here,” Saber says, cheerful.

  We’ve reached Gorgabad, an enclave with several dozen families. We knock at the wooden door of a house Saber knows. The women come out smiling. They hug me when they hear I’m a guest of Saber’s. They make a feast, rice with shorwa, lamb soup with potatoes and garbanzo beans. The meal includes okra, eggplant, salad, and fresh watermelon for dessert. The family is poor, but as is typical in Afghanistan, they’re generous. After Saber and I eat, we walk to the border.

  Signs of modernization make it clear which nation dominates here. On the Afghan side, three sleepy-eyed guards come out of a bombed-out barrack. They eat bread and drink tea all day and sleep by the glow of a lantern as night falls. Each has a rifle in hand, but they say they have no communication devices, no vehicle or binoculars. They have little power to fight armed traffickers.

  The guards deny working with smugglers and say that Iranians watch this place carefully for traffickers passing through. In the last two years, they have caught only five men, carrying ten kilos in sacks on their backs.

  “They’re probably too high to catch a fish, let alone traffickers,” Saber says to me of the three guards.

  Two hundred yards away is the Iranian border post, a two-story building with armed guards standing on all four sides scouting the vast desert with binoculars. Beyond a large, bullet-holed black stone and bushes of thorns is Iran, with its paved roads and electrical poles. Trenches and barbed wire divide parts of this border. The wild wind wails, blowing debris from Iran to Afghanistan.

  The Afghan guards say they had a row with the Iranian guards recently because the latter shot some sheep one night for crossing the black stone—the border mark. The guards’ orders are to shoot anything that moves past the foot-long rock. “We told them that sheep don’t understand borders, and they are people’s livelihoods,” says Khan Mohammed, one of the Afghan soldiers. “They say they have to follow orders. They stick to the law and are scared to do anything without their superiors’ orders.”

  I stand next to the black stone facing Iran, remembering my family’s escape from Afghanistan. In 1982, after six hours on a donkey in the desert heat, I found that the sight of Iran literally quenched my thirst. I had refused to drink the salty well water from the desert during the journey and endured a dry mouth until we crossed the border to Iran and Mr. Jawan’s relatives brought a bucket of cold water. I stuck my head in the red pail and drank like a dog. We walked through the battle zone of the mujahideen and the Soviets. The Iran border symbolized freedom and life for my family then. Iran had just experienced its Islamic Revolution and was in the throes of war with Iraq, while Afghanistan’s Islamists fought communism. Both countries were in the grip of change, revolutions that would destroy the lives of millions. Nearly three decades later, I return to the border craving the peace that could justify the bloodshed of these revolutions. But the wind blows hard, and all I can see is dust.

  Two weeks later Saber comes to Herat city, where I’m back at Sattar Agha’s enjoying the greenery of the orchard and the company of my cousins. I had asked Saber to check on Darya through her neighbors and relatives. We converse outside Sattar Agha’s on the street.

  “Did Haji Sufi take her?” I ask him.

  “The next morning, after we talked to him, the Ghoryan police questioned Haji Sufi on smuggling charges, but they let him go after a two-hour interrogation. I didn’t have to go to Darya. She came to our house looking for you a week after you left.”

  My heart begins to pound. “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘He has left but he swore to come back and take me. Can Fariba Jan make him go away? Please tell her to make him leave me alone.’ ”

  I’m in a daze as I board the flight to Dubai en route to New York. My mind is swirling with unsettled issues. My thoughts shift to Darya. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for her, but I know I will be back to see her. The angry and desperate tone she used to tell her mother she did not want to be married to Haji Sufi still rings in my ears. The shine in her penetrating eyes revealed her fiery spirit to fight a future that threatened to enclose her behind mudbrick walls.

  Chapter Nine

  Where the Poppies Bloom

  Spread out against an emerald-green mountain is a field of thin stalks five to ten inches high. The wind carries the leaves off the ground, but the stalks don’t move. The sun shines on the dead plants. Every morning, Parween stands on the edge of the field, her scarf wrapped tightly around her head. Her wheat-shaped eyes gaze at her land; tears drop on her wrinkled olive skin.

  “Why did they come to my field? Why did I become a target, why?” she thinks as she walks from her house to her field. “Who were the enemies who turned me in, or did they just find my land? My little acre is hidden away from the street, behind the mountain, visible to no outsiders.”

  Parween, a poppy farmer and mother of nine, lives in northeast Afghanistan, in the remote province of Badakhshan. The rain-fed earth her husband inherited is her family’s livelihood. In June 2004, when I meet her near the capital, Faizabad, she is a victim of the Afghan government’s haphazard poppy eradication campaign.

  The Afghan government and its international backers have decided that the best way to rid Afghanistan of the opium trade is to tackle it at its root—by eliminating poppy farms. But the Kabul government has little to no control in this remote province. In 2004, Badakhshan, a magical, verdant landscape bordering Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan and snuggled in the Pamir Mountains, is the third largest poppy-producing province in Afghanistan. After the Communist government fell in 1992, mujahideen leader Ahmad S
hah Massoud managed to keep the Taliban out of Badakhshan; since then the former mujahideen, now warlords and drug dealers, have ruled the area, which is part of the 10 percent of the country the Taliban were unable to seize during their seven-year reign.

  Poppy farming has been a tradition here for centuries, but the level at which it’s grown now, on thousands of acres of land, is unprecedented. During my time here, I uncover tales of triumph, alongside the countless tragedies, resulting from the drug trade in Badakhshan. The conventional wisdom that opium farming is a crime and hurts people is cast in doubt by experiences such as Parween’s, which show both the tragedy and the triumph.

  Parween is one of hundreds of women in Badakhshan who have bettered their lives through the opium business. These women are often landowners, and with the money they make they are able to purchase cars, clothes, and more land, and to build homes. The women landowners work side by side with the men, usually their sons, as their husbands may be too old and fragile. A 2000 UN report on the role of women in the cultivation of the drug trade, conducted before the poppy ban, confirms that the Taliban allowed women to work in poppy fields, which led to both an increased physical burden for women and financial gain. Women used the cash to improve nutrition for their families. It also gave them leverage and status in their villages. Even after the Taliban, some women profited, as in the case of Bibi Deendaray of Kandahar. She told UN surveyors in 2004, “In fact, I should say that it is not an illicit crop but rather a blessing. . . . It is the only means of survival for thousands of women-headed households, women and children in our village whose men are either jobless or were killed during the war.”

  Yet other women mentioned in the 2000 UN report complained that their families used them as unpaid labor, and that poppy farming had increased their workload. In addition to farming, they also had to perform housework, supervise livestock, engage in dairy production, and cook for migrant laborers. These overworked women lamented that they suffered from leg and back pain. They also said they had no time to teach moneymaking skills, such as embroidery, carpet weaving, and sewing, to their daughters, so that they could one day have a legitimate income. The report concludes that although women had more access to cash, decision making remained with the men in the family. Parween’s case is an exception to the UN findings.