Opium Nation Read online

  The insurgency is using drug money to bankroll its fight against Western troops and the Afghan government. The numbers vary on how much drug money is being used each year to fund the insurgency—from $23 million to $250 million—but now the foreign countries with troops on the front line in Afghanistan no longer separate drugs and terrorism as they did from 2001 to 2007. The Taliban mainly tax the farmers and give protection to traffickers, who in turn give them a percentage of their drug profits. NATO and U.S. soldiers arrest traffickers while capturing militants and work with poppy farmers to help them find other means of survival.

  The intensified focus on the drug trade in recent years has made the National Interdiction Unit a critical force, and the women members have become crucial elements as more women become mules and traffickers. Women can smuggle drugs much more easily, hiding a stash in their clothes or suitcases. Some of these women are more powerful than law enforcement officials realize. General Aminullah Amarkhil, the former chief of security at Kabul Airport, once dared to arrest two women and a male member of the Ariana Airlines technical team who were trying to smuggle heroin. The three were headed to India when one of the women was caught with five kilos of the drug. Amarkhil videotaped the arrests. One of the women told Amarkhil, “Do not touch me and do not touch the drugs. If I make one phone call, I can fire you from your position.”

  Amarkhil asked the woman whom she would call.

  “They are powerful people. They are higher than you in the government,” the woman replied. She swore she would get back her heroin.

  The woman was taken to jail. That night Amarkhil received a call from an angry man, an apparent trafficker, who told him that he should not have apprehended the woman and that she would be released. The general found out later that the woman was freed and fled to Pakistan. Amarkhil told the press that the woman’s release was ordered by officials in the government. Shortly after, Amarkhil was charged with a minor offense and fired from his job. The number of drug arrests and seizures at the airport fell after his dismissal. The general fought back, running for Parliament in the September 2010 elections—he lost. Instead, the government appointed him head of border patrol in the north of the country, a job that entails battling drugs.

  The woman who cost the security chief his job was well connected to a major trafficking ring, but most of the Afghan women who transport drugs are victims of poverty and war for whom trafficking is a last resort.

  There are four official gates through which to enter and leave the capital, on paved roads that go north, south, southeast, and west. Each gate is manned by the Rapid Reaction Force police, who stop buses and suspicious vehicles to search for contraband and criminals. Fifty policemen and one policewoman monitor the cars in shifts. Zainab is one of three policewomen at the northern gate, which is known as Kotal Khair Khana. She searches the hundreds of vehicles from eleven provinces that pass through the gate from six AM to six PM, seven days a week. Cars drive at one hundred miles per hour and halt to a sudden stop at the gate. The gate is not an actual gate but consists of a mere rope blocking the wide road and a booth manned by police. The search police live in a small compound on the side of the road surrounded by the Kabul hills, a mosque, a gas station, and a small grocery. They spend their free time in three rooms where they eat, sleep, and watch the traffic go by. The men’s bathroom is a squat toilet inside the compound, and the women’s bathroom is a walk uphill through rocks and bushes of thorns to a ditch. Inside the ditch are human waste and cheap Chinese-made pink toilet paper. The heat intensifies the stench of urine and feces.

  Zainab usually sits with the men, chatting throughout the day. She doesn’t have Farzana’s youthful enthusiasm or Adiba’s apathetic pragmatism toward her job as a drug buster. She has an ambivalent attitude about being part of law enforcement. “I’m happy when I catch a criminal, but I feel sorry for the women. I feel pity for them, but it’s the law.” Zainab is not a member of the NIU but a simple policewoman who finished the requisite three months of police academy training. She has a sixth-grade education but a keen sense of smell to sniff out opium. The NIU women have the satisfaction of thinking that they are capturing evil mafia members and big drug lords, but Zainab’s job, with an income of fifty dollars a month, puts her in contact with ordinary Afghan women smugglers who eke out a living. Most of them are widows.

  At twenty-seven, Zainab is also a widow, and the mother of four children. She rents a room in a house in Kabul without a phone. Her husband, whom she was married to at age thirteen, was killed in the war between the mujahideen and the Taliban, in Takhar province. “He was a mujahid fighting against the Taliban. He could not stand the way they looked at Islam and how they made the religion seem so bad in the eyes of the world,” Zainab says in her soft-spoken voice. “If he were alive, I would’ve preferred not to work, but he would’ve been proud that I got this job.”

  Zainab is one of the best among all the officers at sniffing out hidden drugs. “She can smell the opium from a long distance,” says her commander, Lal Mohammed. “I’m very happy with her because she’s also kind to the people she catches. Having a woman on the team makes us more humane.”

  We’re sitting inside one of the rooms in the compound looking out the window for large passenger buses to arrive. Zainab wears a long coat and over it a jersey jacket with the word Police written in English and Farsi on the back. Her head scarf is wrapped tightly, with no hair visible. Her nails are polished red, and her eyebrows are unnaturally black, penciled unevenly to form an exaggerated arch around her eyes.

  Zainab has caught more than fifty women with contraband tucked away, mostly in their handbags, including a small bomb, firearms, hashish, and of course opium and heroin. She rattles off a list of her conquests for me.

  “It was a Monday, about ten am. A woman in a van coming from a nearby village had several kilos of opium neatly packed in her vest. I always get suspicious when women wear vests, because they’re out of style these days. In another case, it was a rich woman dressed in an expensive pantsuit. I smelled her large video camera. We found sixteen kilos hidden in the camera and its tapes. She was the owner of a poppy farm and was taking the harvest to sell in Kabul.

  “Another time, I caught seven kilos in a blanket. Most of the smugglers coming on this route are from Mazar city. They hide it in every place they can think of: thermoses, tapes, inside jewelry. They spray their belongings with a perfume that is usually sprayed on dead people before they are buried, to cover the smell, but that’s always a giveaway for me. One woman resisted the search. When I insisted, she slapped me twice and scratched my hands. ‘What do you want? I have nothing,’ she said. My commander had to calm her down, and when I finally searched her, I found a small amount of opium in a soap dish. She was an addict.” Zainab pauses, her voice quivering. “She really had nothing on her, she was so poor. We let her go.”

  “You weren’t upset that she slapped you?” I ask. “You could’ve arrested her for assault.”

  “It wasn’t worth it,” she explains, regaining the composure in her voice.

  Zainab’s compassion toward the smugglers is uncommon among police, who are known to beat and sometimes torture criminals. She empathizes with the smugglers’ desperation; their life stories echo hers. The difference is Zainab had options and chose the law; the women smugglers turned to illicit means for survival. This choice seems to weigh her down with guilt, but she pushes it away.

  “It’s almost time for the next bus to arrive,” she says, eyeing her watch. “We should go stand outside.”

  A few minutes later a bus the size of a Greyhound stops, and Zainab boards it with confidence. I follow her with the policemen. While the policemen search all the men, Zainab makes eye contact with every woman but doesn’t pat down all of them. The passengers look sleepy after a ten-hour ride from Takhar. Zainab picks five or six women. She asks them to stand politely, then digs her hands through all the crevices of their clothes and bodies. Afterward, she picks up their bel
ongings and looks through every item. She finds nothing illegal. “You can sit down now. Thank you.” The policemen do not step off the bus until Zainab is done. They have to protect her.

  “Let us go. This is a waste of time,” one woman shouts. “If you wanted to catch the real criminals, you would have stopped the Benzes with tinted windows!”

  The policemen and Zainab do not respond. After the suitcases in the baggage compartment are searched, the police commander motions the driver to pull away. The search team heads back to the compound as a black SUV with tinted windows zooms by.

  “Why aren’t you going to search that car?” I ask. “How do you decide which vehicles to search?”

  “Sometimes informants from the northern provinces will call us and tell us if there are private cars that need to be searched. We usually stick to the public vehicles and search private cars we deem suspicious,” Lal Mohammed, the commander explains.

  “But aren’t the big shipments of drugs transported in private cars?” I ask. “The public vehicles are usually the poor people who smuggle small amounts.”

  Lal Mohammed gives me a knowing look. “We do what we’re told from the top,” he answers.

  “Don’t you feel like your job is futile when the drugs are passing right by you?” I insist.

  “We can’t stop the real perpetrators,” he admits halfheartedly. “If it’s a minister or some general, we can’t stop them. We have to show respect for them.” If his team intercepted these vehicles, an official from the top echelons of the government would make sure the smugglers were freed. Lal Mohammed might lose his job, as the Kabul airport security chief did. Isolated and vulnerable to insurgent attacks, the search team plays it safe and focuses on finding a few kilos of opium on the poorest. When I ask Zainab how she feels about the injustice of this, she takes her time responding.

  “I focus on my little job and leave the bigger things to the educated folks,” she says, and then smirks. “I’ve never known there to be justice in Afghanistan. The poor always lose.”

  Children kick a soccer ball around inside the women’s section of Karbul’s notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, a penitentiary of doom built decades ago by the French and filled with political prisoners, serial killers, and terrorists. The torture chambers of Pul-e-Charkhi are etched in the collective memory of educated Afghans imprisoned during the Communist invasion. A guard inside the men’s section of the prison says he can hear ghosts moaning at night, the souls of the innocent who suffered and died here. I enter the prison after a major riot in which there is a shootout between guards and inmates and several men die. I walk slowly through the concrete grounds, wondering if my paternal uncle who disappeared during the Soviet invasion spent time here.

  The women’s section of the prison is a separate structure a few yards distant from the main building. It’s separated by high walls and a large door. The women incarcerated here can keep their children with them during their sentence. I stroll through the loud hallways. A woman with a boy’s short black haircut, her hair sticking out in different directions, walks around with a boom box playing Ahmed Zahir’s songs.

  Tell the heavens

  To deliver my heart’s desire to my lover.

  A few women sing along, while others sway from side to side as they do their chores. The women roam freely inside this building, which resembles a college dormitory. They even have a television set to watch the local stations. It’s near lunchtime and the sound of the pressure cooker competes with the music. An aroma of rice and bean stew wafts down the hallway. These are not the conditions I imagined at Pul-e-Charkhi, but the guard tells me the men’s section is “really a jail. This is more like playland.”

  The prison may seem like a playland, but when visitors’ hours end, the guards can do what they want. In 2004, women in the central Kabul jail (not Pul-e-Charkhi) waiting for their cases to be heard staged a riot. I listened outside the walls of the small jail on the government grounds in downtown Kabul as they screamed and shouted words I could not hear. They were protesting being raped by the guards. More than half of the women in Afghan jails are serving sentences for moral crimes, such as running away from home, often from forced marriages.

  Totakai is not one of them. She is one of seventy women in jail here, and one of five women convicted for drug smuggling. When I walk in, she is lying on a bunk bed. She sits up and spreads a blanket over her legs. Her eyes are sunken and her creased brown skin is sallow. “I’ve been here for six months and I haven’t really eaten for three of those months,” she explains.

  She is a forty-year-old widow with four daughters and one son. Her son is fifteen and the family breadwinner, with a small shop that sells gum and drinks in Nangarhar province. He has also been convicted for drug smuggling, as an accomplice to his mother.

  She wears a purple velvet dress and a silver ring on her finger with fading henna on the tips of her fingers and fingernails. “I didn’t do it,” she says, without any inquiry from me. “I was framed. Somebody put the sack of heroin under my feet in the station wagon. I had gone for a holiday from Nangarhar to Peshawar and on my way back, we decided to pass Nangarhar and go south to Ghazni for a pilgrimage. We took a taxi with six other passengers and when we stopped for a bathroom break, a man brought a bag and put it under my feet.”

  “Why did you let him do that? Didn’t you want to know what was in it?” I ask.

  “I was too tired from all the traveling.”

  Totakai is from Shinwar, Nangarhar, an area infamous for heroin laboratories. The counternarcotics police routinely fly in helicopters and travel through the mountain passes of Shinwar to blow up the labs. All they usually find are empty pots and pans.

  Totakai pleads ignorance about the laboratories and how many kilos of heroin the police found on her. “I don’t know these things,” she says. “I just sit here and cry and pray that I can go home soon.”

  “But you’ve been convicted of heroin smuggling. You’re going to be here a while. Do you know how long?”

  “No. The defense attorney told me she can get me out soon.”

  “Where’s your family? Do they visit you?”

  “They don’t know I’m here. They would kill me if they find out. It’s better if they think I’m dead,” she says, lying down and crawling under her blanket.

  Totakai is one of several women I interview in Afghan jails charged with narcotics smuggling, and she is representative of most who end up in jail. They are usually poor women without the contacts or the money to bribe their way out. She may lose her health being incarcerated, and I think about putting her in touch with Zainab. The two women are both widows with children, and the heads of their households. Perhaps the compassionate Zainab can overlook Totakai’s small crime and find a way to reunite her with her family. I hope that something more powerful than money—empathy from a woman in the government—can rescue this inmate.

  Later I explain Totakai’s story to Zainab on the phone at work, and she says she has little power but will bring the case up with her superiors. I leave the matter to the two women and go in search of a female trafficker who’s still actively working.

  I sit on a lone chair inside an empty office in Pul-e-Khumri, a luscious city in the northern province of Baghlan, famous as a vacation spot before the wars, and listen to Haroon. Baghlan produces pistachios and has a copper mine, but it is becoming a drug trafficking center as well. Haroon is an intellectual from a reputable family who works for a cultural organization. He also happens to have many friends who are drug traffickers. He claims absolute innocence, but possesses a wealth of information about the business in his province. I tell him I would like to meet a woman trafficker. He has one in mind, but informs me that I can meet her only if I pretend to be a buyer.

  “In order for the transaction to go through, you must provide them with a hostage. They will release the hostage when the meeting is over. They want six hundred dollars up front before the meeting, just for the opportunity to talk to them. They thin
k you’re big because you’re a foreigner, and that’s where the market is. They said they have a ton [of opium] to sell.

  “Conditions include no discussion except for the price and the purity of the product. The other woman will bring a sample for you to try, and you’re not allowed to take a notebook, pen, map, or any weapons with you. They will pick you up from the town center and take you to the destination. I can be your escort but I cannot be part of the transaction.

  “Ready to do it?” He looks at me, expecting an excited yes.

  “The question is do I have to actually buy the opium?”

  “Probably a few kilos to show them you mean business and then tell them you’ll buy the rest later,” Haroon says matter-of-factly.

  “Who do they think I am?” I ask.

  “I told them you were a writer researching a book on women and didn’t have the money to publish it. And you hang out with hedonist foreigners who like to use drugs for recreation. As soon as I said ‘foreigner’ and ‘drugs,’ they got excited.

  “My head’s on the line, because they’re trusting you because of me,” he says sternly. “So when should we go through with it?” he impatiently asks.

  “I’ll get back to you,” I reply. I walk out of his office and never see him again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Adventures in Karte Parwan

  General Asif, head of the National Interdiction Unit, tells me I can join them on a drug raid if I agree to watch from afar. The raid is going to take place in my old neighborhood, Karte Parwan. The NIU agents are going to surround the drug dealer in his shop on the main street of the neighborhood and search his place, where they expect to find opium and hashish. Then they will arrest him. I am ordered to position myself across the street like a bystander.