Opium Nation Page 22

  Daud is an infamously mysterious man in the Afghan government. He has led the counternarcotics police since 2004 from the interior ministry, and insiders in the ministry have long accused him of helping drug smugglers transport narcotics and receiving huge cuts for his efforts. Other officials in the Afghan government say he’s not just assisting the traffickers, but is a kingpin who controls the drug trade in the north of the country. Insiders say Karzai and his foreign backers deliberately hired Daud knowing he was involved in drugs in the hope that he would reform and rein in the traffickers under him—or keep the trade unified to prevent the business from falling under the control of smaller bandits.

  The Karzai government demands hard evidence to investigate Daud or Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, who is accused of being an influential player in narcotics in Kandahar and Helmand. Daud, a native of the northern Takhar province, is a former member of Massoud’s mujahideen group. He was rewarded with his high position in the government in part because he helps the Americans fight against the Taliban. In his hometown in Farkhar, Takhar, people recite poems in his honor. He can mobilize up to six thousand troops in forty-eight hours. But his appearance belies his power. He is a Tajik with soft manicured hands and a well-groomed beard framing handsome features. He’s not a typical mujahideen. He speaks English, writes e-mails on a laptop, and has become media savvy with training from the American public relations firm The Rendon Group. He has two wives; the second is an American citizen.

  Shortly after Daud is appointed as the antidrug czar, Lailuma and I interview him for a Pajhwok story about police officials involved in drug smuggling. I tread lightly when posing questions that might be seen as accusing him of any wrongdoing.

  “How do you plan to root out these police smugglers?” I ask.

  “We’ll have a new accountability unit,” he says. “We’re hopeful that we can get rid of them. We won’t solve the problem as long as there are corrupt police in the government, so dealing with these insiders is part of the policy.”

  The next time I meet with Daud is after the Los Angeles Times runs a story quoting one of his provincial deputies, Lieutenant Nyamatullah Nyamat, saying that his boss and his boss’s brother Haji Agha protect traffickers. In the same article, a trafficker claims that Daud helped him secure a large shipment of drugs through the Salang Tunnel, the road that connects the north to Kabul.

  It’s unclear if Daud has mistaken me for a Los Angeles Times reporter or thinks I can write a rebuttal. He’s angry and accusatory as I walk into his office.

  “You realize that you reporters are writing lies all the time,” he scoffs.

  I look at him confused. I’m aware of the article, but I’ve come to discuss a different matter.

  “You need to write the truth,” he insists. “Nyamat apologized to me for lying to the reporter about me. He will tell you that and swear by it. You need to write that and make sure people know I’m not a drug smuggler.”

  I nod my head and say nothing. Daud grabs a phone and calls Nyamat. There’s no response.

  “I’ll get you in touch with him later. If you’re a good reporter you will follow up on this.”

  I agree, and on another day when I call Daud, Nyamat is sitting in his office and Daud hands him the phone. The deputy hurriedly spews a practiced speech about Daud’s innocence and how the Los Angeles Times misquoted him.

  “Daud Sahib is innocent. He has nothing to do with the drug trade,” Nyamat says. I am surprised the deputy still has a job, but he’s no longer based in Kunduz province, which is part of Daud’s turf. Briefly after the Los Angeles Times article is published in May 2005, Nyamat went missing. Daud secretly ordered his arrest, but British advisers persuaded the chief to release him. Nyamat is assigned a post in Bamiyan, a province in central Afghanistan and the least active area in drug trafficking.

  Sayyed Jan, whom the smuggler police catch with heroin and the letter from Daud, is jailed, but he bribes his way out and is reported to be dealing drugs in Pakistan. Daud tries to free him at first, but later sides with the prosecution. Jan’s relatives claim that Jan paid $50,000 to be allowed to traffic a convoy through Daud’s zone. Jan is from Helmand and buys protection from government officials to run his heroin refineries and safely smuggle out his drugs. Daud is one of his most expensive protectors, but his letters are effective.

  The letter Jan presents to the police is one of several paper documents leading to Daud, and his story only one of the dozens of other anecdotes detailing Daud’s involvement in the drug trade. In another story counternarcotics agents capture a fuel tanker containing 1,540 pounds of opium and, after the driver makes a phone call, Daud’s own bodyguards show up to free the shipment. The tanker and drugs are taken to the counternarcotics headquarters in the interior ministry.

  I decide to make a trip through the Salang Tunnel to Daud’s home province Takhar.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Raids in Takhar

  I have come to Takhar, General Daud’s turf, because the vendors here deal in heroin. Many of the smugglers are former mujahideen and current government officials. Before he was appointed the counternarcotics chief, Daud was governor of Takhar. The Taliban killed Daud’s leader, Massoud, in Takhar. The province borders Tajikistan and is a transport route from other provinces to Central Asian countries and Russia, one of the largest markets for Afghan opiates. Competing with the Turkish and Albanian mafias for Afghan drug profits in Central Asia is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an extremist group aligned with al Qaeda and operating from Pakistan’s tribal territories. Yet even in Central Asia and Russia, the mafia has powerful partners in the government who facilitate the transport of drugs. These groups have Afghan counterparts in Takhar.

  I hire a local Takhar driver who owns a Toyota Corolla that is not capable of going more than twenty miles per hour on the unpaved plains and mountains.

  “We have to go to Rustaq tonight. Don’t worry. It’s safe,” my guide, Baktosh, a twenty-three-year-old Kabul university student, promises me. Baktosh also decides to give two of his relatives a ride without asking me. I sit in the front, and they bunch together in the backseat. Our driver isn’t talkative or friendly. He stops the Toyota several times en route to take care of personal business in different homes. When he parks at a rest stop for dinner, I am fed up. It is pitch black and I am not hungry. We’ve already driven eight hours from Kabul to Takhar’s capital, Taloqan. Rustaq, Baktosh’s home district, is another five hours of driving. “Can’t we keep going? It’s midnight and I’m the only woman here.”

  “There are good commanders here who don’t harm innocent people,” Baktosh shoots back. “Good commanders” is an oxymoron in Afghanistan, but with the power vacuum left by the central government, it is the commanders who have brought a sense of security. The Kabul government has little control here. Local warlords divide up the turf by ethnicity. Mujahideen commanders Piram Qul, who’s Uzbek, has controlled Rustaq district, and Amer Bashir, a Tajik, has reigned over Chahab district—both were unchallenged dictators for thirteen years, until the first parliamentary elections in 2005. Tajiks dominate Takhar, with Uzbeks as the second largest group. Pockets of Pashtuns and Hazaras also live here. These former mujahideen commanders have been in power in northern Takhar since 1992. The Kokcha River circles Rustaq and branches out to the Amu River, which divides Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The Taliban seized Takhar up to the Kokcha, but they have not been able to cross the river to capture the northern part of the province, which borders Badakhshan province. These commanders, under the leadership of Massoud, repelled the Taliban until the latter were ousted by the United States in 2001.

  The commanders have solidified their power base at the expense of civilians, but the local population has begun to fight back. In May 2005, a year before my visit, thousands of people rose up to call for the removal of the “good” commanders, in demonstrations that killed a few people and injured dozens. When I arrive in 2006, the province is relatively calm.
Rows over drugs are the main cause of insecurity.

  The province is considered middle class by Afghan standards. The 830,000 residents have access to irrigated and rain-fed land on which they grow mainly rice and wheat. Poppy production makes up 3 percent of agriculture. The opium produced in Badakhshan is transported to Takhar for trafficking to Central Asia. Takhar also has two factories and is rich in minerals: gold, coal, salt, and gems. About 16 percent of the people are literate, and 32 percent of the children attend school.

  Marco Polo traveled in Takhar in 1275. He described the region as fine and fruitful, with a great corn market and lofty hills, and he was impressed with the salt mines. “They all consist of white salt, extremely hard, with which the people for a distance of thirty days’ journey round come to provide themselves, for it is esteemed the purest that is found in the world. It is so hard, that it can be broken only with great iron hammers. The quantity is so great that all the countries of the earth might be supplied from thence.” Now Takhar is known mostly for drug trafficking.

  At the rest stop, the men leave me alone in the car and go in search of dinner at a nearby restaurant. I need a few minutes alone. I get out to stretch my legs and dust off my clothes. I can see the stars, but it’s too dark to see anything on the ground clearly. I hear the sound of a waterfall or a river. It’s familiar; it is the Kokcha, I realize. I close my eyes and take in the fresh air, soothed a bit by the sound of water. I walk toward the river I traveled across in Badakhshan, hoping to wash my hands and face in its white water. In the darkness, I bump into a truck full of what looks like flour sacks. I can hear the men dining in a restaurant nearby, smell the hot plates of rice and kabobs being served. I continue to walk in search of the Kokcha. Suddenly the sound of a deep male voice stops me. In front of me is a Russian Jeep with the English word Police written across it. A man sits inside, handcuffed. Two other men in uniforms stand outside in intense discussion. I can make out a few words, but the conversation is garbled. I am sure I hear “powder,” which is the local term for heroin. I don’t want them to see me; I hide behind the truck. My fidgeting makes a cracking noise on the gravel, and the men stop their discussion and look in my direction. I hear them walking toward me, and my heart starts to pound. The police here are often the criminals. What are they going to do to me? I wish I could somehow disappear under the truck or among the sacks of flour. My breathing is loud and I am trying hard to be silent. I feel paralyzed. The men’s footsteps get closer.

  They walk right past me.

  I wait until I can no longer hear them walking and then I head back to the car.

  A day later, safe at Baktosh’s uncle’s house in Rustaq, I find out that the trail of the heroin bust I witnessed involves an intricate rivalry between the federal secret police, called Amniat, and the local police. In June 2006, a month before I visit Takhar, Amniat raided two heroin labs in Bekha village in Rustaq district and arrested two men who were making heroin in abandoned village homes. Rustaq was devastated by an earthquake in 1998; five thousand were killed and thirty thousand became homeless. Bekha was destroyed, and its few survivors moved to Rustaq town center. Still left in Bekha are dozens of crumbling mud-brick shacks, ideal for setting up heroin labs.

  One of the Amniat agents who made the arrest tells me the labs were operating with impunity from the Rustaq police, who were receiving kickbacks from the heroin profits.

  “There were ten to twelve of us on the job on a Sunday night about two am. We filled up two Datsun Jeeps from Taloqan to head for Bekha,” the agent begins. “It’s a mountainous village near Badakhshan. Badakhshan’s where most of the heroin labs are in the north of the country. We had information from insiders of two locations in Bekha; they were two hours apart. There are no paved roads up there. We were heavily armed because we didn’t know what we were up against. Sometimes the labs are guarded by armed uniformed policemen.

  “At one location we found one man who claimed to be from Nangarhar [province]. It’s usually Pashtuns from Nangarhar or Pakistanis who are experts in heroin making. It’s hard to tell the difference, since both groups speak similar Pashto and look alike.

  “One man, the one who was the chemist, wasn’t there. We captured his assistant with two pots the size of oil barrels and a container for storing opium. He’s just a boy and has an artificial leg. He had four Kalashnikovs, which we took, but he didn’t fight back. They had set up big gas stoves, which they used to cook the opium. At the second location, we captured a guy doing the same thing. He had a boxlike machine that makes twenty percent heroin.”

  “What’s the process in refining opium to heroin?” I ask the agent. We sit in a room at the secret police offices eating fresh melons with our hands. Outside the room, sitting in the sunlight, are the rusting silver-colored pots they seized from the bust. Shouldn’t they be sealed and hidden? I think, then realize that this evidence is outside to be displayed for the media. It’s a picture of a seizure that officials can show to the public to prove that police are actually fighting drugs rather than dealing them. The truth is more complicated.

  “They boil the opium and let the gunk rise to the top,” the agent answers. “They take what’s left at the bottom and mix it with carbon, acid, and other chemicals. They can make it for different levels of purity. We captured ninety-one kilos of opium, which can be turned into about thirteen kilos of heroin. But they had already refined sixty-seven packets [kilos] of heroin that we also seized.”

  The two men captured from the two labs are still in jail. The agent says he doesn’t know if they will provide more information about whom they worked for or if they will even be prosecuted.

  I ask him the same question I asked Asif’s NIU team in Kabul.

  “What’s the point of the capture if they walk free and don’t give you any information?”

  The agent raises his shoulder in defeat. “The local prosecutor was upset with us for arresting them. I did my job. I’m not sure what will happen next. We have a long way to go.”

  “Did General Daud have anything to do with these labs?” I ask suddenly.

  The agent looks taken aback. “Uh, uh, I would not know that. And if I did, I could not tell you.”

  The first drug lab in Afghanistan was set up in Nangarhar province in 1971 by a rogue chemist from Germany—a German first created the morphine base for heroin in Germany in 1803, and an Englishman in Britain first synthesized morphine into heroin in 1874. Heroin became a drug of choice on the hippie trail in the 1960s and ’70s after Pashtun tribes in Pakistan’s tribal territories recognized the demand for narcotics and began opening labs with the help of Western-educated chemists. By 1995 there were hundreds of heroin labs in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has limited control over FATA, but that same year, it executed a massive antidrug operation, destroying two hundred labs. Downsizing poppy cultivation and drug processing in Pakistan propelled the business inside Afghanistan, a country in the grip of war and with no functioning government to fight drugs.

  Matt DuPee, an Afghan security specialist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has done extensive research into drug labs in Afghanistan. He says Nangarhar’s first lab was rudimentary, but that members of the Shinwari and Afridi tribes there have now become experts in the business, and the province still boasts the most high-tech labs. According to DuPee’s research, labs in Afghanistan burgeoned in 1986 in mujahideen-held territory. The mujahideen had discovered that processing the drug domestically was much more profitable. Prior to 1986, Burma held the record for the biggest producer of poppy, but that year Afghanistan’s output surpassed Burma’s, and Burmese chemists later traveled to Afghanistan to transform opium into heroin. They showed the Afghans the technique with basic equipment.

  The two-thirds of opium refined domestically are done so in facilities capable of making a simple morphine base, the first of eight forms of the narcotic; the eighth form is the purest heroin. I
n Afghanistan the purest form is called crystal, and in the United States it’s China White, the most potent and expensive form of the drug, and the one that gives the most intense impact when injected. On the streets, dealers and addicts cut heroin with adulterants ranging from something as benign as baby formula to caustic substances such as Ajax cleaning powder, to maximize the amount and profit.

  The profits are ten times higher, and more traders will come to farms to buy, if the farmer turns the opium into a morphine base. To do so is fairly simple. An opium farmer can use a wood-fired stove, a pot, big barrels, and cheesecloth as a sieve. The farmer also needs some easily available chemicals, such as ammonias and slaked lime, also known as calcium hydroxide, often used in cement and fertilizer. Slaked lime is legal to import. The most important ingredient for turning opium into morphine, however, is water—it takes twelve to fifteen gallons of water to make two kilos of heroin.

  DuPee says the facilities become more sophisticated if there’s a gas stove to cook large quantities in single batches, and if they’re stationary. These “processing workshops” are usually situated in sparsely populated areas in homes or mountain caves. Mobile labs can make pure heroin, but in small amounts. The numbers vary as to how many labs exist in Afghanistan. The United Nations estimates seventy-five to seventy-eight heroin labs, a figure that seems to refer to the most advanced, those that can produce large quantities of China White. But the Tajikistan government estimates that close to its border, in Badakhshan alone, there are at least four hundred labs. The three provinces with the most labs are Badakhshan, Nangarhar, and Helmand, but such facilities are in operation in most Afghan provinces, except for a few in central Afghanistan.