Opium Nation Read online

  The key ingredient used for China White is the illegal precursor chemical acetic anhydride (AA). Traffickers import the chemical from South Korea, India, and China to Afghanistan, where it arrives by the truckload, says DuPee. “When I was in Baghlan province, you could see a lot of trucks on the highway with blue chemical jugs going through. Locally, they call it water, because it’s as important as water. There’s no one to stop the trucks because nobody has any idea, even the American military, as to what they’re looking at.”

  The people who man the labs are mostly Afghans, but to produce China White, chemists from Turkey, Burma, Pakistan, and Iran are hired. The chemicals can be explosive if mishandled by amateurs. The Afghan workers are men, but according to DuPee, during the Taliban years, because they were forced to stay indoors, more women joined the work in the south. Labs are in closed compounds, and the process involves cooking, a task considered suitable for Afghan women. It takes from eight to twelve workers to run a large lab, plus twenty to thirty security guards.

  “The guards are needed to protect the products from competitor traffickers but mostly from the police, who can seize and sell it, not confiscate it,” DuPee says. “It’s accepted that seizures will lead to skimming by police, but the local perception is that good police skim small amounts and the bad police will horde large quantities.”

  The destruction of these labs does little to fight the drug trade, since the labs can be set up easily again. The counternarcotics agents find out the locations sometimes with intelligence help from the Americans or British, and at times from civilians. Counternarcotics agents enjoy the spectacle of shooting at pots and pans and blowing up the labs. Members of the NIU team tell me it’s their favorite part of fighting drugs. But most of the time they don’t arrest anyone. Double agents tip off lab workers, who are able to pack up and leave before the NIU arrives. From 2003 to 2008, authorities destroyed 527 labs, but DuPee concedes that many of them were empty of personnel and drugs. Only equipment was seized.

  The two labs raided in Takhar are considered advanced. The boxlike equipment the Amniat agent described as being seized there are most likely industrial-size car jacks that can lift fifteen-ton trucks. Car jacks are used as presses in drug labs.

  The capture of the two men in Rustaq was considered a victory for counternarcotics because it could lead to more raids and arrests. And it did.

  In July 2006, an Amniat agent named Atiq was arrested with six kilos of heroin reported to be skimmed from the stash seized in Bekha. He was caught with the powder in a Jeep marked Police near the Kokcha River in Rustaq.

  I was a witness.

  One of the uniformed men who walked past me that evening when I hid near the river was Khaleeq, the Rustaq police chief. Khaleeq was angry with Atiq for two reasons. “A few months back, Atiq arrested Khaleeq with a stash of powder, and Khaleeq had to pull many strings and pay off a lot of people to get out,” says a Rustaq man close to Khaleeq.

  Atiq, a nonthreatening bureaucrat in a suit, allegedly seized from Khaleeq thirty kilos of heroin worth $30,000. The federal agent kept twenty-five of the kilos and filtered the heroin to increase the amount.

  “Then you know about the labs in Bekha,” the Rustaq man continued. “Khaleeq had a big cut in those labs. Atiq was one of the Amniat men who raided the labs. But of course, he had to take something for himself. It’s the norm here.

  “Khaleeq didn’t need evidence that Atiq had taken a few kilos. He just assumed, and he got lucky when Khaleeq stopped Atiq’s car on the Kokcha. Six kilos from the Bekha stuff, the pure heroin, was found in his car. It was sweet revenge for Khaleeq.”

  “Amniat told me that Atiq was working undercover trying to infiltrate a drug mafia. The drugs were for the job. How true is that?” I ask the man.

  He laughs incredulously. “How can Atiq go undercover here when we all know his face? That’s the explanation for the media.”

  The man’s account is corroborated by several other Rustaq officials, including at the counternarcotics directorate.

  When I go to the Amniat offices to find out what happened to Atiq, the agent who described the labs to me says, “He was freed. He wasn’t guilty. He was just doing his job undercover. The Rustaq police didn’t know. We seized the drugs found on him and sent him back to Kabul to continue doing a good job.”

  The culture of drug trafficking in the north, unlike in the south, is not tied to tribal loyalties. Anyone in a position of power can deal drugs and benefit from it. Whether it’s ignoring the illicit activity, taking kickbacks, or being directly involved, counternarcotics agents tell me the majority of high-ranking police and former mujahideen commanders and their cohorts are dealing drugs. “From the youngest to the oldest are involved in this, from the farmer to the intellectual,” says Abdul Hakim, the counternarcotics chief in Rustaq. “People buy their positions. That’s obvious. They are completely illiterate but they work as big guys in the government here.”

  “You’re not illiterate but you’re a big guy in the government,” I say, smiling. “So, by that account, are you involved?”

  Hakim laughs and says firmly, “No.”

  I give him a list of names of officials I’ve been told are drug traffickers and ask him if the list is accurate. The last name on the list is Daud’s. Hakim gets uncomfortable. “I know who’s involved but I cannot tell you. I just can’t. I can share with you when I know I can be protected.”

  In the lower ranks, betrayals, greed, and double crossings occur often among corrupt officials. They implement the law when it serves them, either in revenge or for profit. Higher-ranking men write protection letters in exchange for thousands of dollars in cash. The corruption reaches all the way up to Karzai, who has been protecting his brother Ahmed Wali and others in his administration from arrest. In April 2009 he pardoned five convicted traffickers, one of whom was related to his campaign manager. His interior minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali, resigned in 2005 because Karzai refused to rid the government of drug dealers.

  The political divisions are of little concern to traffickers. “Smugglers couldn’t care less about who is Pashtun or Tajik or what language the man speaks,” says a U.S. embassy official in Kabul. “The Northern Alliance guys will fight Taliban drug dealers one day and negotiate drug deals with them on another.”

  There might be only a few clean officials in Rustaq, but nationwide there are thousands of respectable policemen who make an honest effort to fight the trade. Still, the consequence of being clean can be deadly.

  “If a police officer refuses to allow a drug deal to go through, he can be fired, beaten, killed, or simply his superior will receive thousands in cash to replace him,” says one Amniat agent in Kabul. “In some cases, clean cops are forced to become dirty.”

  What draws me to Takhar is Daud and heroin, and to find out how the two are related. But I discover that Daud’s dealings are a well-kept secret in his home province. I speak to more than two dozen people involved in narcotics or counternarcotics and more than a dozen have a similar reaction: they look surprised, they pause, and then they say, in various ways, that they are too afraid to talk about him.

  In September 2010, Karzai reshuffles the interior ministry and Daud is transferred as the chief of counternarcotics to become police chief for the northern region. His transfer is among many others and no official reasons are given for the changes. But the shift in position does not take away Daud’s power to influence the drug trade. It’s not a demotion and it allows him to solidify power over the north.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Uprisings Against Warlords

  Amer Bashir, the commander who rules Chahab, a district two hours from Rustaq, leads a caravan of sixteen cars to a village at the edge of the Amu River, in Takhar. Across the river is Tajikistan. Bashir is campaigning to become a member of Parliament, to represent the district he has controlled for more than a decade. It’s a muggy Friday afternoon and most of the men in the village of Samti are walking to the mosque for Friday pra
yers. A thick-necked, balding man of forty-five years, Bashir is feeling confident and practicing his speech in his head en route to the mosque when a group of men stop his caravan.

  One of the men, Haji Abdul Rahman, a native of Samti, shouts, “We know you. You don’t need to campaign here. Go back the way you came!”

  Bashir, startled, stays inside his SUV but rolls the window down and shouts back, “I have the power and will remain in power!”

  The men stand together to form a barricade against the caravan. Bashir orders one of his guards to fire at Rahman, but the bullet misses him and injures a young man standing next to him. The echo of gunshots draws more men to the scene. They pick up stones and break branches from trees to use as weapons.

  The pioneers of the booming heroin business are the former mujahideen, and their alliance with the United States and NATO has allowed them to solidify their hold on the business and their power over entire regions of the country. They form a loose hierarchy of authority, with leaders such as Daud at the top and smaller commanders such as Bashir and Piram Qul as middlemen. But at the same time that foreign intervention has helped them maintain their dominance, the West’s promise of democracy has instilled confidence in Afghan civilians to rise up against the smaller commanders who terrorize them.

  The natives of Samti are poor farmers who have been terrorized under Bashir’s dictatorship. Most are Farsi-speaking Tajiks. Bashir was a mujahid they cheered on during the Soviet invasion, but much has changed in the last twenty years. Chahab residents tell colorful stories of Bashir and his militiamen.

  “One of Bashir’s commanders forced a white-haired elder to carry him from one village to another,” says Mohammed Azam, a teacher, farmer, and respected resident of Chahab district. “He would force shopkeepers to give him a ten percent tax, even if they didn’t make any profits. He ran the heroin trafficking that crosses the river to Tajikistan from Samti.” Azam is also a former Communist who was district governor before Bashir seized power. He says Bashir considers him his archrival. After the Communists fell from power, Bashir took charge of Chahab and imprisoned Azam, but later released him. Still, Bashir attempted to kill Azam several times after his release. Azam shows me the bullet holes in his guesthouse, where he plays chess with a friend. “I was just sitting here like I am now and his men climbed the wall of my house and began shooting. I crawled to my backyard and made it out alive, but I know he will get to me eventually. I have nowhere to hide.”

  Azam, who lives in Chahab town center, describes Bashir as a ruthless tyrant who murdered his own family members to maintain control. “Bashir financed his army of twenty-five hundred men with heroin money. Jeeps full of heroin would come to Samti. Bashir gave fifty dollars to fifty men, one dollar for each man who agreed to be a courier to and from Tajikistan. He would load each person with fourteen to twenty kilos to transport and include a few armed militiamen with each group of men. They had rockets, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, and a Thuraya [satellite] phone. They boarded boats made of cowskin, and each one had to be a good swimmer in case the boat sank. They used certain areas of the river to cross, not more than fifty to one hundred meters. Russians watched the Amu from their post. The smugglers communicated with their Tajiki counterparts, telling them on satellite phones that they were going to deliver how much heroin to what location. They spoke to each other in code. Houses, villages, and mountains where they were to meet and deliver the heroin had number codes.”

  “What were their chances of getting caught?” I ask.

  “People would drown or get shot by the Russians on the other side. Now the Tajikis themselves are in charge, and they don’t shoot, so the chances of survival are better. It’s an open border for trafficking.”

  “Who were the couriers?”

  “Samti villagers who know the river well. Bashir controlled them. Their wives and daughters belonged to Bashir and his men. They would go to a house, send the men out to work, and force their women to do what they wanted. That was the last straw for the people. That kind of dishonor, binamosy, cannot be tolerated by our people.”

  “Did Bashir do anything for the people?” I ask.

  “Bashir tried to build a water dam, which was never finished. He repaired a water storage tank, but used it only to water his own land. The people who worked on these projects were not paid. The reason Bashir stayed in power this long is because he is protected by a drug mafia.”

  Yet even the mafia distanced itself from Bashir.

  In May 2005 one of Bashir’s militiamen, Commander Mahmoud, was accused of raping a girl from Samti shortly before Bashir began campaigning. The villagers, perhaps two thousand of them, were livid.

  Bashir was warned by his advisers not to go to Samti, but he is genuinely surprised to see a mob headed toward him. “What are they doing?” he asks one of his bodyguards after the bodyguard wounds the young Samti man with his gun. Bashir cannot believe that people have the gall to stand up to him.

  “They’re upset because of the girl. I think we should leave,” the guard tells Bashir.

  “Let’s head back to Chahab center,” Bashir orders.

  His skillful driver quickly makes a U-turn, honking. Bashir’s guard points his gun out the car window. People clear the way for Bashir but break his car windows and damage six of the other cars in his caravan. Women stand on the roofs of their houses throwing rocks. The mob of men stops one of the cars, pulls out the passengers, beats them, then holds them hostage for two days. No one is killed in Samti, but other villages hear of the uprising and they take to the streets chanting against Bashir. “Death to Amer Bashir!” they shout. “We want justice!”

  Bashir hides in a village along the mountains of Chahab while the central government in Kabul tries to defuse the situation. The Chahab district governor and police are frightened of the people and of Bashir. Kabul sends a delegation to talk to the villagers. NATO sends planes to monitor the protests from the air. The villagers show up at the town center, the chowk, in anticipation of seeing Bashir and hearing the government promise to try him in court for his crimes.

  “The government lied to us,” says Azam. “Bashir paid everyone off in the government and never faced the public. He tried to escape a few days later, but people found out and attacked his car. But this time the central government guarded him. There was a shootout between the police protecting him and his rivals, and some people got injured. Then Bashir left. He went to Kabul and escaped justice.”

  Bashir lost his campaign for Parliament.

  “Who runs the drug business now?” I ask Azam.

  “It’s not centralized so much anymore. Anyone with a gun and power can do it.”

  Azam is a lively storyteller, but I’m wary of his Communist past and the bias he holds against the mujahideen. He offers to take me to Samti to talk to the villagers. “They should tell you about the things Bashir did to them.”

  During the riots in Chahab a dispute heats up in Rustaq. The director of education, a follower of Commander Piram Qul, and a teacher’s recruit are accused of stealing money from students. The students call for the educators to be transferred from their district. Piram Qul, who is also campaigning for Parliament, stands behind the director and the recruit. The people of Rustaq hear about the uprisings in Chahab. Communists, rival commanders, and those who have suffered under Piram Qul for the last thirteen years become inspired. Piram Qul is accused of crimes similar to Bashir’s, including heroin trafficking. The fever of demonstrations spreads rapidly as thousands of men gather at the Rustaq chowk with a loudspeaker. They demand Qul’s removal from elections and the disarmament of the local commanders. “No more guns. We want law!” the demonstrators chant.

  Piram Qul is much more powerful, clever, and articulate than Bashir, and he can point to a few development projects—schools built by NGOs and a health clinic—to show for his years in control. He has a solid constituency of supporters, who come out to defend him in the demonstrations.

  The weeklong standoff among the
people of Rustaq ends violently. Two people are killed and thirty-three injured.

  The people of Takhar tested the boundaries of the nation’s nascent democracy in 2005. The demonstrations, albeit disorganized, were a plea for a modern form of justice, a chance to free people from a system ruled by strongmen and corrupt police funded by drug money. Although Piram Qul was elected to the lower house of Parliament, and now travels between Kabul and Rustaq, Bashir was driven out temporarily, and the director of education in Rustaq was transferred to another district. But these short-term victories would entail deadly consequences for the people of Takhar.

  It’s ten in the morning and the nippy March cold lingers, the stubbornness of a Takhar winter prevailing against the blossoms of spring. The donkeys, which hee-haw throughout the day as they transport melons and other fruits and vegetables, are unusually quiet. The bells around the necks of the sheep crossing the rocky alleyways interrupt the silence of the morning. Two six-year-old boys, Yosuf and Feraidoon, who are neighbors and close friends, hug themselves to ward off the chill, their light sweaters not warm enough. The boys walk toward their school, both holding empty plastic containers. Today the two first-graders are off from school, but their mothers have sent them to bring clean water for drinking and cooking from the fountain near the school. The majority of homes in Takhar do not have running water; they depend on well water. The boys’ fathers, Halim and Najib, are also good friends. When the adults meet for tea and conversation, the boys run around and play soccer. On this morning there are no other adults with the boys except a few shopkeepers on the block, who barely notice the children. Yosuf and Feraidoon twirl open the tops of their containers and take turns filling the two gallons with the icy water. A few drops wet their clothes. Yosuf shivers. When the water overflows, Feraidoon seals the cap and tries to lift his container. It’s too heavy, but he pulls it up with all his might.