Opium Nation Read online

  Men in Afghanistan, as in many other parts of the world, can marry women decades younger—Parween is forty-four, and her husband, Kemal, is sixty. He used to make a living from loading his donkey with sacks of bricks for delivery to construction sites. Now his back hurts and he needs to rest every hour. His wife is in charge of the household. When I meet her on a breezy, sunny day, she is grieving the loss of what could’ve been thousands of dollars in poppy profits.

  I arrive at Parween’s colorful home unannounced. Her daughter Samarkand answers the door and takes me to the field, where Parween is hunched over a wooden frame weaving a gilim, a flat handwoven fabric that can be used as carpet or tapestry. Samarkand’s daughter, Shakila, plays with her grandmother’s waist-length black braids, which peek out of her burgundy scarf. The wooden frame is spread out on the field where they plant their poppy.

  Parween is unlike the women I’ve met in Herat. She’s physically stronger and more confident. She walks with flair and isn’t shy about sharing her opinions. She does not waste time on lengthy Afghan greetings.

  “The government came and destroyed my crops and gave me nothing in return. Go tell them that they need to give me something back,” she orders me as she weaves. She does not look up to speak. The gilim she is creating is striped with earth colors—red, mustard, olive green.

  A month before, in May, the poppy flowers bloomed, a breathtaking violet color. When the petals fell, Parween stayed in the field from sunrise to sunset lancing the bulb-size capsules. Planting and weeding the poppy had taken four months. Parween owns another half acre on top of the mountain, and there she planted potatoes, but the seeds failed to yield anything. Poppy’s reward is ten times greater. A kilo of opium extracted from poppy plants can bring a profit of $30 to $400.

  In 2003 she sold twenty kilos of dry opium for $8,000, more than any of her relatives or neighbors could imagine making with wheat or potato farming. “I sold the opium to the Pashtuns who come to the villages. Men in motorcycles come to small farms like mine and buy the opium we package in plastic bags. We don’t have to go to them,” she explains.

  With the money she made, she bought one of her sons a car, which he’s using as a taxi to support his family. She bought clothes for the entire family and a new frame for carpet weaving. But most important, she bought food, including rice and meat, to feed her family three times a day, a luxury she does not remember having in her lifetime.

  Samarkand says when she was younger her family went to sleep hungry three nights a week. Then her father, Kemal, moved them close to the city of Faizabad, and since then, her mother and father have been working tirelessly to provide for their six sons and three daughters. Samarkand, the eldest, is twenty-six; the youngest, Shaima, is six years old. “My father would carry the bricks and my mother laid them wherever they went to do construction work. My mother is like a man but with a kinder heart,” says Samarkand, a thin, smiling woman with sleek black hair and chiseled cheekbones. “My mother is illiterate, but most of us have finished high school. My father was a firm believer in education.”

  Yet most of Parween’s children still depend on their parents financially. Parween is getting old and tired. Her kidneys give her pain, and she has headaches in the morning. Despite the ailments, her energy level is still high, and she hopes she can help her children become self-sufficient. When drought dries up her farmland, she sews, weaves, and runs her household. She is a member of the women’s weaving organization in Badakhshan—the group gives small loans for women with skills to open businesses. Parween and Samarkand have received $150 from the organization to weave carpets, tablecloths, and towels to sell. But the income from the weaving business pays for only one meal a day.

  Parween is a workaholic. She cannot sit still at home or in the field. Drinking a glass of tea, she feels, takes too much time and impedes her productivity. “I did all the work on the land myself. I bought the poppy seeds from”—she pauses—“people.” The pause is an attempt to preserve the identity of the creditors who loan farmers seeds. Once the harvest comes in, the creditors take a cut of the opium or demand cash. “I learned poppy farming by watching other poppy farmers. Nobody had to teach me,” she insists.

  “I have God, and God says we have to be hopeful, but on the day they came, I never felt more hopeless. I cried perhaps three times in my life in front of others. Once at my mother’s funeral, the second time because my daughter was ill with the measles and I thought she would die, and the third was at my father’s funeral. But since they came with their swords, my tears will not stop flowing.”

  Parween puts down the knife she cuts the yarn with and looks at the mountains. “The view calms me,” she explains. The uncut grass sprawls from the field through the hills; the sky is spotless blue as the sun shines on a kaleidoscope of wildflowers at the bottom of the hills.

  “It was four in the afternoon when my field was raped,” she begins. “I had scored the bulbs the day before, to ooze out the opium gum. Samarkand and I went out after our afternoon prayers to the field to collect the opium dried on the outer part of the bulb. I had heard that the government was trying to show that it was fighting opium farming. Planting opium was officially illegal, but every influential family in Faizabad had an opium farm.”

  The government fights the planting after the fact, when it is time to harvest. Soldiers are paid six dollars a day to thrash the poppies, while farmers watch with anxiety. The reality is that the crops of landowners and farmers who have power and contacts in the government are spared, while those of people such as Parween, poor and disconnected from the higher ranks, are destroyed. Parween had been so afraid of the poppy killers that, on some nights, she slept next to her field on a mat under a mosquito net. And when they came, she knew her efforts, her hours of labor, and her main income for the entire year would be gone.

  “There were ten of them, in four cars. They wore camouflage uniforms and carried Kalashnikovs and long blades. The men burst out, pointing their guns fearfully. I took a kitchen knife I kept in my dress pocket and held it to my throat. I told them, ‘You come near this field and I’ll kill myself. Stay away because this is all I have.’ They told me, ‘Khala, we have to do this. This is the law. We don’t want you to hurt yourself, and we don’t want to hurt you. But if you attack us, we will shoot,’ a tall man with light skin firmly said. But there was a man who looked like their boss—he was wearing pants and a shirt—and he told them to leave my land alone. But no one listened to him. They listened to the light-skinned man, and the soldiers pushed passed me.”

  Parween dropped the knife in defeat and grabbed her daughter. What if they raped us, too? she worried. “I ran inside the house to call my sons.” The entire neighborhood soon descended on Parween’s land to witness the pillage. The soldiers swung at the juicy, ripe bulbs, severing each head from the body. They left only the stalks. Their police caps hiding their faces, they sweated and panted under the blue sky heat until every single capsule was on the ground.

  Samarkand held her mother, burying her face in her chest. Parween made no sound. Her eyes were wet and her face stung, but she felt nothing. Her sons made a fuss. They cursed the soldiers. They ran to the field to stop the destruction. But the commander raised his gun and fired a warning shot. So the sons could only watch like caged, hungry tigers whose last morsel of food was being trashed in front of them.

  After their task was complete, the soldiers demanded water. Parween called her sons to get them a pail from the water storage tank—water her sons had walked an hour to collect from the mountain spring. Then the men jumped back in their cars and drove away quickly.

  “I bet we’re the only ones in town they did this to,” Samarkand whispered in her mother’s ear. “If we had bribed the mujahideen groups in charge of the police, maybe they wouldn’t have done this.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Parween retorted, pushing her fragile daughter away. She took the edge of her scarf and dried her eyes. Walking like an old haggard woman t
oward the mud-brick house, she paced herself. Once inside her darkened room, she dropped to her knees and howled.

  When the U.S.-led coalition defeated the Taliban in late 2001, poppy cultivation was at its lowest due to the Taliban’s successful ban on opium farming the previous year. Cultivation in Afghanistan had been reduced from two hundred thousand acres to about nineteen thousand, a 91 percent decline. The only places where production rose were provinces under mujahideen control, such as Badakhshan, where it increased nearly three times, from six thousand to sixteen thousand acres. This rise would spread throughout the country over the next year. The power vacuum that followed the Taliban defeat and the skyrocketing price of opium, at $500 a kilo, encouraged farmers to plant again. Soon mujahideen warlords regained control of their turf, and they had no objections to opium farming—they would find ways to benefit from it.

  The return to mass opium farming worried the international community, but a cohesive counternarcotics strategy eluded Afghan and foreign authorities, in part because the American military did not want to confront illicit narcotics. Foreign troops were in Afghanistan to fight terrorism, and many Afghan informants bankrolled by the U.S.-led coalition were drug dealers. The Pentagon considered the drug trade a low priority and left it to the British to develop an antidrug strategy. The experienced officials in the State Department, however, warned that the money the insurgency made from opium grown in Afghanistan would go toward buying arms to be used against coalition soldiers.

  In the Bonn agreement, the British were assigned the lead on the counternarcotics front. The United Kingdom initially considered buying the entire Afghanistan poppy crop for $50 million to $150 million from all the farmers who’d planted, but that plan was abandoned for fear it would be an incentive for more farmers to plant poppy. It might have worked better than what occurred: a series of grave errors that led to record poppy output.

  From April to June 2002, the British compensated farmers $350 for less than half an acre for eliminating their crops. Boxes of cash to the tune of $3.5 million were flown in to opium-cultivated areas and distributed to local authorities to hand out to farmers. Soldiers then ripped out the crop from the soil with their tools and tractors or slashed the stalks just before harvest. About 11,120 acres of poppy harvest were destroyed.

  But many of the officials who received the cash from the British, former mujahideen, pocketed the money or took a cut, instead of giving it all to the farmers. In order to collect more cash, farmers claimed that more acres than they actually possessed had been destroyed. The British had not counted on the corruption of the Afghan government and, as in the case of many other development projects, did not have enough international monitors to ensure that the funds reached the farmers.

  A UN report published in 2003 states that farmers in Faizabad received the cash, but their crops were not destroyed. In the same report, a farmer in Helmand province admitted that he paid an Afghan official $180 to tell the British that he had eradicated double the amount of poppy he actually had, so that he could get double the compensation. Instead, the Afghan official did not pay him anything, and the farmer was left with a large debt he’d accrued on the crops destroyed. He said he had to sell his seven-year-old daughter into marriage to pay his lender.

  Poorer farmers and sharecroppers under the Salaam (peace) system take a cash advance from lenders, who are normally traffickers, on their opium harvest. That money is used to pay for poppy seeds and to support their daily survival. The opium crops are sold at half the price of their value at least two years before the actual harvest. If a drought or other event, such as government eradication, prevents the harvest, the farmers fall deeper into debt. The 2003 UN report says that more than 70 percent of the farmers whose crops were destroyed said their debt had increased.

  In the spring of 2004, in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, the American company DynCorp paid five dollars a day to dozens of Afghan troops to eradicate poppy fields. A year later, the soldiers plunged into one of the most dangerous areas: the poppy fields in the district of Maiwand in Kandahar province. As DynCorp supervisors watched, the Afghan troops, armed with bush hogs, knives, and tractors, slashed the ripe poppy stalks. A group of three hundred villagers gathered at the site shouting in protest, but the crowd dispersed after the police fired warning shots. Meanwhile, about twenty-five miles from where DynCorp was monitoring the poppy slashers, some six hundred demonstrators descended on Kandahar city to protest the eradication. The farmers shouted that their livelihoods were being destroyed, without any compensation. The protest degenerated into violence and ended in tragedy. Local police—who DynCorp points out had not yet been trained—fired into the crowd, killing twelve people.

  This failed attempt at eradication propelled a shift in strategy. Other options were considered: providing poppy farmers with alternative employment and lucrative crops, such as saffron, that could offer higher returns compared to wheat. But opium profits were too enticing. Not only that, but the plant has other benefits. The stalks and pods make soap, fuel, and animal fodder. The seeds of the crop can be used to make oil: ten kilograms of poppy seeds provide five kilograms of edible oil.

  Afghan farmers are open to alternatives, says Tom Brown, a consultant with the nonprofit Central Asia Development Group, which works with drug farmers. “The idea is to find new markets for new crops, like okra, and sell it,” he tells me. “The benefits may be less than opium in the short term, but in the long term, farmers understand that it’s for the best.”

  Brown’s group as well as other aid organizations are working on promoting alternative livelihoods, which require a multifaceted solution, including providing the jobless in poppy districts with employment in digging irrigation canals and building roads so that it will be easier to transport food crops. The strategy also includes training the local police and authorities to provide security for farmers so that they will not be forced to grow poppy or to hand over their profits to corrupt officials.

  Donor countries have provided the staff and money for such alternative livelihood programs, with the United States giving the largest amount of aid: hundreds of millions of dollars. But initial programs failed, for several reasons: The large sums allocated for cash-for-work programs, and the seed and fertilizer handouts, provided a perverse incentive for farmers to take the handouts and continue planting poppy when the aid ran out. Agencies such as USAID used the programs, normally implemented in emergency conditions, as a strategy for long-term agricultural change, with unrealistic deadlines and expectations. As a result, some NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) assigned to execute the programs were forced to return donor money.

  The Taliban also contributed to the program’s failure: In Helmand, the Taliban and their friendly drug traffickers sabotaged projects quickly. In spring 2005 they killed eleven Afghan aid workers taking part in the attempt to draw farmers away from poppy. By 2004 the United States had curtailed its funding for the program and promoted a “fast-and-furious” approach to eradication. The U.S. strategy snubbed the soft British approach and encouraged a “random, certain and universal—with no areas exempt” eradication of fields, to instill fear in farmers. This method also failed, as poppy production rose each subsequent year.

  In some provinces, however, alternative livelihoods have shown some signs of progress. In Nangarhar, and even Ghoryan in Herat, profitable substitute crops, such as saffron, have produced small-scale successes and have convinced farmers to stop growing poppy—for the time being. Yet the fact remains that no crop is as profitable as poppy.

  The long-term goal should not be to reduce acres of poppy, as alternative livelihood experts David Mansfield and Adam Pain wrote in a briefing for a Kabul think tank, but the “establishment of those institutions for formal governance, promotion of strong civil society, and strengthening of social protection mechanisms.”

  In Badakhshan, no one offered Parween any other alternatives.

  The gilim is half done and Parween orders
her daughter to bring tea for me. She seems emotionally drained after recounting how her land was eradicated.

  “Was it the worst day of your life?” I ask her.

  She pauses, looks at her field again, and replies, “It seemed like it at the time, but now I know it was just another day of life. We can plant again, but we won’t if we find a way to irrigate the field without dependence on rain.”

  The Kokcha River, a major tributary in the north of the country, cuts through Badakhshan, but getting the water to the fields is a challenge the aid community is grappling with, and farmers such as Parween say they can sustain themselves if they have the water to grow food.

  “My sons tell me I should stop working and they’ll give me food. They can drive taxis, work construction jobs, and farm, but it would be better to stop living if I stop working.”

  “Would you work as a drug dealer? You can make more money that way,” I joke.

  She takes me seriously. “Never!”

  “Where are the drug dealers in Badakhshan?” I ask.

  “I don’t know where they are, but I’m sure you’ll find some in Argu district. There they’re all drug dealers. They haven’t destroyed their farms there because they pay the oshor [tax] and bribes to officials. You’ll find an entire market of opium and heroin vendors.”

  I leave Parween, perplexed—is the drug trade really a detrimental business when so many poor families are profiting, especially women? In my mind, the moral clarity that drugs are evil and have destroyed families in Ghoryan is complicated by the various ways in which they have affected lives in different parts of the country. While widows fall into debt and must give up their land to drug lords in Herat, women with land in Badakhshan turn their poppy profits into sustainable income. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a French expert on the international drug trade, summed up the paradox of Afghanistan’s opium economy in an article for Jane’s Intelligence Review : “On the one hand, the war economy has favored the growth of the drug economy and opium trafficking has given warlords the means to perpetuate conflict. But, on the other hand, the opium economy has made survival possible for many farmers and contributed a great deal to the overall country’s economy. Hence, to some extent, the opium economy has helped stabilize a country coming out of over two decades of war and facing a derelict economy.” The industry has provided jobs, stimulated the rural economy, helped reconstruct villages, and, in some cases, when the opium harvest was plentiful, helped lower farmers’ debt burdens.