Opium Nation Page 19

  “It has made you nice and fat, and the whole neighborhood thinks you’re becoming a rich woman,” Parizad responds with equal fervor. “It made me a skinny woman who can’t have children anymore. Do you know I haven’t had my period for a year now, and I’m only thirty-five?”

  “Damn this fatness. I wish I had your girly figure,” Bibigul jokes with her daughter-in-law. “And who needs more kids? The girls make enough noise around here. Besides, who said you were thirty-five? You’re probably forty-five and should be reaching menopause anyway. Don’t blame opium on your troubles. The only bad thing it has done to you is make your breasts smaller. My poor son would appreciate bigger breasts.” Bibigul laughs heartily.

  I sit on their red-colored mats quietly as they joke with each other.

  Bibigul finally turns to me. “I became addicted when my husband died three years ago in Pakistan. We didn’t have enough to eat. We opened our fast during Ramadan with water. But opium was the only cure for my aches. It’s cheaper than medicine. I didn’t know it could be addictive, but now I know and I want to quit but I can’t. It’s like being hungry and you need to eat. My stomach doesn’t just growl, my entire body growls. So I eat it.”

  At a 2010 Moscow conference about the drug trade in Afghanistan, Russia reported that it had surpassed Iran as the highest consumer of Afghan opiates: 549 tons. Iran came in second with 547 tons. However, Iran still holds the highest ratio of addiction per capita. Pakistan has an estimated four million addicts. The Central Asian countries bordering northern Afghanistan are seeing a rise in their addiction population, too, as instability and poverty grow at the same rate as opium output in Afghanistan. Europe consumes 711 tons. In Britain, the aristocracy used heroin in the first half of the twentieth century, but the drug has swiftly made its way into the lower classes in rural and urban areas. Addicts report that the amount of heroin that cost $100 in the 1970s now costs $20 on London streets, and 90 percent of the heroin in Britain is from Afghanistan. In the United States and Europe, the addiction rate is steady, but counternarcotics experts are predicting a surge even there, as heroin is becoming more available, more potent, and more affordable.

  The United States leads the world in the number of drug addicts. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2008, 20.1 million Americans aged twelve and older abused drugs—that’s 8 percent of the entire U.S. population. The most popular illicit drug is marijuana (15.2 million). The least used, but the most deadly, is heroin (0.2 million). According to the DEA, 18 percent of the heroin, 212 tons, entering the United States and Canada originates from Afghanistan. Afghan heroin is so pure it can be smoked or snorted; it doesn’t have to be injected. In December 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that for Americans who procure Afghan heroin, the number of overdoses is rising, because addicts have not adapted to the drug’s potency.

  In Afghanistan, American soldiers and contractors face the same risk of addiction that Soviet troops did during war. In March 2009, a DynCorp company team leader died from an overdose and four of his team leaders tested positive for drug abuse. Six months later, a Dyncorp medic was found dead of a possible drug overdose in Kabul. Australian soldiers are also suffering overdoses. In October 2009, the Web site The Daily Beast reported that the Taliban were employing a common tactic of war by supplying drugs to foreign troops. The insurgency has found local pipelines to provide drugs to Americans at Bagram Airfield. American soldiers who’d become addicted told The Daily Beast that the local bazaar in Bagram sells heroin, and soldiers trade knives, helmets, and flak jackets for the drug. Drug abuse among U.S. troops may have doubled since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began. The American government randomly tests soldiers and, if they are addicted, flies them home for treatment.

  The addicts with the fewest resources for treatment are Afghans. For Riaz, Bibigul, and Parizad, the possibility of a drug-free future is dim, despite their efforts to seek treatment. The overflow of cheap opium and heroin, the dearth of health care, and the high unemployment rate in Kabul will continue to make it that much more difficult for them to surrender the narcotic that temporarily soothes the pain that has lasted three decades.

  On her way back to the United States, my mother has to stop off in Kabul again because it has the only international airport in the country. She’s beaming with enthusiasm when she arrives from Herat after twenty-two days. She can’t stop talking.

  “I attended two weddings in one day, my nephew’s and my cousin’s daughter’s wedding. There were so many people I saw and everyone was so kind. We ate sumptuous food and I watched the young girls do these new Iranian dances at the weddings.

  “I did get sick from eating salad one day. I was vomiting and my bacha mama [maternal cousin] had to bring in a nurse to give me an IV. There was no Prilosec for my stomach problems.

  “I wore the burqa just to keep the dust off me, but I am so clumsy at wearing it now.

  “I was so impressed with Herat. It is so much better off than Kabul. My relatives are wealthier now than when I left them. They advanced despite the wars. Their kids are more educated, in pharmacy school; one is head of a department at Herat University.

  “But I have to say my favorite part were the public bathhouses. They’re so clean and nice now. Before women used to dip themselves and jump in the water storage tank, and the bath water was so dirty. But now there’s normal plumbing and faucets with sparkling clean water, hot and cold water, and each person can have their own little room to wash in. What was the same as twenty years ago? The women wore gold still, gossiped, and enjoyed each other in the bathhouse.”

  My mother has one more day and night at my house in Kabul before her flight to the United States. “Madar, would you come back to live here?” I ask the question that has been nagging me since she left for Herat. Somehow, in the back of my mind, I think if my mother returns to live here, I can have my family and homeland together again.

  She pauses. “Maybe.”

  That day, I walk her up to the roof of the Karte Parwan house. A comfortable breeze cools my face. I look at the scene: the kite flyers, the women washing clothes in their courtyards, the children playing hopscotch in the street. It feels good to be part of a Kabul returning to normal life. But my mother has the opposite reaction.

  “The houses are so small and ugly. They all look the same, like Pakistan. The courtyards are tiny. They used to have large gardens in Kabul courtyards. Look over there. There used to be so many trees and a little creek there. It’s dry with thorns now. And the debris—look at that building; those holes in it must be the places where the bullets entered. And that building over there is missing its roof. Look at the piles of garbage and all the flies. These children on the street”—she takes a deep breath—“they look so thin and hungry.”

  Then she stops talking. She buries her face in her hands and cries, loudly this time, for half an hour. I just hold her and let her grieve. Only four years ago I stood at the edge of the roof of my grandfather’s orchard home in Herat and felt a surge of powerful emotions. The Kabul view is the most my mother has seen of the capital. Driving on the streets and shopping have not revealed the stark nakedness of the city’s destruction. The manzara (view) is a bittersweet reminder of unwanted changes; the physical picture of the ugly remains of what was once a beautiful city with beautiful people. Her Kabul is dead.

  I make cups of green tea for us in the kitchen. “Fariba, I don’t think I could live here again,” my mother says. “There’s no proper health care and I’m sick. It’s not safe, and my grandchildren are in the United States. You know I can’t live without them. I’m used to it there.”

  “It’s okay, Madar. I understand. You don’t have to come back. I’ll always come and see you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Women on Both Sides of the Law

  Inside the newly built counternarcotics compound in Kabul, Farzana and Nazaneen stand in the back row with the rest of the women in the National Interdiction Unit—behind the men. They
do not want their male colleagues to gawk at their behinds when they bend down for exercises.

  “Push-ups!” shouts Jane, their Blackwater-employed American trainer.

  The two dozen men and women drop to the ground and pant through their push-ups. Farzana and Nazaneen, at eighteen and nineteen, are the youngest members of the team. The NIU consists of 225 members in 10 groups. They are training to become Afghanistan’s elite drug enforcement agents. Men and women are both held to the same physical and intelligence standards. The fifteen women have to pass the same tests of strength and coordination. The women like going to the shooting range in helicopters, but they wish they could skip the workouts. Just a few years ago, under the Taliban, these women weren’t allowed to leave their homes unattended. Now they’re preparing to fight brutal drug dealers alongside male colleagues. They walk around the compound in police fatigues, caps, and boots. They carry Glock 17 pistols, Kalashnikovs, or machine guns on stakeouts. Few of them have been tested in actual drug busts or other operations, but Farzana and Nazaneen have already proven their might on a city bus. The team calls them the Ninja Ladies.

  Farzana, a lively teenager, drinks her cup of green tea in the women’s locker room, where there are beds and a dining table for overnight shifts inside the compound. Nazaneen is absent today due to an illness.

  “I feel alone without her,” Farzana says. “She’s my partner in everything.”

  Farzana is petite, with high cheekbones and a thick braid of smooth, straight black hair. Both of the girls come from the Hazara ethnic group, descendants of Genghis Khan. The Hazaras have been persecuted throughout Afghanistan’s contemporary history and are considered the poorest and hardest working people in the region. They are Shiites with East Asian features that physically set them apart from Tajiks and Pashtuns. But decades of refugee life—tens of thousands of them fled to Iran during the wars—gave Hazaras the education and opportunities to mobilize upward when they repatriated to Afghanistan. Hazaras are running for president and seats in Parliament; the only female governor is Hazara; and many of the winning performers on Afghan Star, Afghanistan’s version of American Idol, have been Hazaras. Farzana and Nazaneen exude the confidence of a people freed from apartheid.

  “I will do what is necessary to defend myself and my colleagues,” Farzana says, beaming. “My parents raised me to be confident and feel equal to men. I’m anticipating going on an operation and fighting criminals. I’m proud to serve my country.”

  “I heard you’ve already been tested on a Kabul bus,” I say.

  Farzana laughs, clearly embarrassed. “Before the unit had their own bus to take them home we had to take public buses,” she begins. The buses in Kabul are supposed to be gender segregated, but the crowds prevent any kind of order. Men and women end up sitting together, an act that would’ve cost several lashes under the Taliban.

  “We were both dressed in our usual long coat and head scarf heading home on the milli [national] bus. We leave our fatigues at work. Men and women were stacked against each other, with little room for mobility. We clutched our handbags tightly and held on to each other for support. A clean-shaven man with beady eyes and long fingers was making kissing sounds at us. I warned him with a harsh stare. Yet he was turned on by the defiance. He lightly caressed my shoulder.

  “Nazaneen watched, livid. She kept a calm face but she actually has a temper worse than any man I know, especially when her friends are being offended. Nazaneen is actually the one who speaks up when comments are made against women. She lost her patience with this man. She grabbed his hand away from my shoulder and cursed him. The man ignored her and touched my other shoulder with his other hand and stroked the back of my leg with his knee. Nazaneen jerked and stuck her elbow into his stomach,” Farzana recalls, picking up the thermos to pour another cup of tea.

  The harasser wasn’t expecting these women to fight so hard. Usually women move away from harassers, because that is considered the polite and proper thing for them to do. If they do fight back, they usually do it verbally. But these women couldn’t have cared less about being proper, and they had the confidence to overpower the man.

  “His temper flared, and he bent forward and brandished a small knife to strike Nazaneen. The passengers noticed the harassment but apparently not the knife, because they just watched. I saw the weapon and quickly held out my hand to prevent the blow. As the man raised the knife and struck forward, the blade seared my hand, between my thumb and forefinger, and I felt a cold sting and then pouring blood.”

  Nazeneen didn’t stand still. Both girls had been given a weapon—a Ka-Bar knife with a sharp blade and round green handle with a metal cover—the same one U.S. Marines carry. She rapidly reached into her bag to grab her knife and then stabbed the man in his leg with all her strength. He screamed and spouted a string of pejoratives.

  “Stop the damn bus!” he shouted at the bus driver. “These women are whores and killers. Get them!” The clueless driver pressed the brakes suddenly and many of the passengers fell on top of one another.

  Amid the chaos, Farzana wrapped her hand in a cloth she’d found in her purse, to minimize the bleeding. The back door of the bus slid open and the passengers cleared the way. The man ran off holding his leg, while the girls jumped out and yelled for help. Nazaneen held her friend’s bleeding hand tightly. Farzana’s head was pounding, and all she could hear was the rapid beating of her heart. Nazaneen hailed a yellow-and-white Kabul cab.

  “When we reached the hospital, the doctor said, ‘Who the hell gave you the right to carry a knife?’ We didn’t tell him that we worked for the government as police. We usually keep our job a secret. We just told him that our knives were for self-defense, and this was such a case. I got several stitches,” she says, showing me the wound between her thumb and forefinger. It’s her scar of glory.

  “You seem to like your job. Why?” I ask.

  “Because I can do it well, and as women, we have to prove ourselves.”

  Adiba, Farzana’s oldest female colleague, who is sitting near us, eyes the teenager patronizingly. “It’s not as fun as you think, qandem [sweetie],” she says.

  Adiba has taken part in several drug raids. Forty-one years old, she was a police general for six years and had extensive police training under the Communist regime. She seems jaded and tired. I learn she has three children and is working to support them; agents receive about $150 a month. The adventure of raids doesn’t entice her.

  “I’m happy to be a part of this team, but these operations are the same. We’re just told to search the women perpetrators for now; and the rest the men take care of. They don’t really expect us to do any shooting and fighting. The last operation I went on was uneventful. My superiors called me in the middle of the night and told me to be ready. They don’t announce the busts sooner because of double agents.

  “We went through the mountains in Logar province [near Kabul]. The road was so dark and scary that I considered that the most dangerous part,” Adiba shares as she freshens her makeup and takes down her hair from a bun. She’s getting ready to go home. Her burqa hangs in her locker.

  “Once we got to the location, there were sixty men in a caravan of cars and me, the only woman. We spent two nights there. We raided a house and I was called in to search the women. I was dressed in my police uniform. They didn’t believe I was a woman. They asked me to show my private body parts to prove it, so I did,” Adiba says as the other girls giggle.

  Adiba is extremely feminine, with red painted nails and three-inch heels. She has more makeup on than the other women combined, and her voluptuous figure makes it hard for me to believe she could ever have been mistaken for a man. Perhaps in her uniform she looks more masculine.

  “The women resisted, calling me names, but I found nothing on their bodies. I found several firearms in suitcases. My male colleagues confiscated dozens of containers of hashish in the same house. It was a well-off family.”

  “Was anyone arrested?” I ask.
>
  “No. The man of the house, whom we wanted to arrest, had already escaped.”

  “Have you gone on any operations that became violent?”

  “Yes, in one operation four men were killed and two were injured. I was told to stay put in the car,” Adiba says. She doesn’t embellish or provide too much detail, like many other law enforcement personnel I interview. She’s politely taciturn, well trained in discretion.

  Farzana and her other younger colleagues listen to Adiba wide-eyed.

  “I can’t wait to join you,” Farzana says.

  “You’ll get over it,” Adiba responds. She grabs her purse and burqa and drapes the garment over her arm, then shuts her locker. It’s three thirty PM, time for her to go home, make dinner for her children, and do the laundry.

  During the Bush-Blair years, the four pillars of the counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan include forced eradication, bolstered law enforcement, interdiction, and alternative development. One key component missing from this strategy, which would have involved the nations that receive Afghan drugs, was reduction in demand. The most effective way to reduce illicit drug consumption is to find ways to prevent addiction, counternarcotics agents from various nations tell me. But Afghan counternarcotics agents know little about this concept. They know only that poppy farms must be eradicated, and that law enforcement must have the tools and skills to interdict and capture the kingpins and traffickers who control the drug trade. Implementing the strategy has been a slow process, as those involved are unable to keep up with the growing number of poppy farms, addicts, and traffickers.

  Two Afghan ministries are dedicated to counternarcotics. The Ministry of the Interior handles the policing and interdiction, and the new Ministry of Counternarcotics is supposed to create policy and strategy. But nearly every Afghan ministry must deal with the impact of drugs: the Ministry of Justice is responsible for prosecuting corrupt officials and drug lords; the Ministry of Agriculture has to work with farmers when their crops are eradicated, to provide seeds and fertilizer for alternative crops; the Ministry of Health must help treat the burgeoning number of drug addicts; and the Ministry of Defense is directly involved in fighting the trade as the Afghan National Army, NATO, and U.S. troops battle traffickers in bed with the insurgency. The problem is that in every echelon of the government, corrupt officials receive bribes to look the other way or take cuts from the trade. Some of the officials are traffickers themselves.