Opium Nation Read online

  “Do you realize how inappropriate it is for an Afghan woman to do this?” he asks me. “Where are you really from? If the Taliban were in charge now, we would’ve shown you our punishment.”

  I shiver and hope he doesn’t see it. I am glad that I now feel more trust for Imran, but the more I trust him, the less the man attacking me trusts him. He seems to be questioning Imran’s loyalty. It’s her or us. The driver pretends he doesn’t hear, and none of us says much. I repeat that I have no bad intentions. Yet I know from that moment that the man’s objections are about not just my being a woman traveling alone but my being a threat to him.

  Imran informs me a few hours later that the brothers were afraid that I was a spy working for the U.S. government. They feared that I was infiltrating their homes and gathering information about their activities with the Taliban. The U.S.-led coalition conducts regular raids on homes suspected of housing or aiding insurgents, and districts in Helmand have been the focus of many of these raids.

  We drop the man off outside Kandahar. Once he’s out of the taxi, I thank Imran and Sameh.

  “I appreciate both of you risking your necks out here for me.”

  “I’m sorry we failed to find the girl,” Imran laments.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” I say.

  When we reach Kandahar, I feel safe but sick. I have to stop the car to get out and vomit. Imran hands me a bottle of water afterward and suggests we stop at a rural area en route to the city. “This area is famous for drug lords marrying girls they’ve bought with opium,” he says.

  Two hours later the taxi halts in front of a large gate. Imran asks a passerby if he knows of any new brides from Herat in the last year. It is a strange question to ask, and the boy gives him a confused look. Imran then shows the photo of Darya’s husband. The boy shakes his head and says, “I don’t know this man, but there are a lot of Herati girls who are second and third wives to the men here. They are opium brides. Most of them are from the district of Ghoryan.”

  When Imran translates the information, my jaw drops. I had an idea how common the practice was, but hearing it explained by this boy makes it clear that the link between the drug lords in the south and the traffickers in Herat is probably a multimillion-dollar business bartering women, boys, and drugs—all in one.

  We reach the hotel in Kandahar city. I am exhausted. I pay Imran $100 and Sameh $50 and walk to my room. I take a long shower, crawl under the covers of the bed, and try to sleep. I stare at the ceiling for hours.

  I feel the failure of not finding Darya looming over me. I will not make a difference in her life. But she has made a difference in mine. A deep sense of loss begins to sink in.

  I returned to Afghanistan with a myth, and Darya embodied that myth.

  The Western media propagates an image of a romantic Afghanistan, one that cannot be conquered or tamed. Its people are warriors whose only purpose is to resist and fight; they are unruly natives unwelcoming to modern society. Afghanistan is a mystery that no outsider can unravel or know. Western experts warn that just like the British and the Soviets, the United States will fail to pacify Afghanistan. Others believe that Afghanistan may be uncivilized, but that it’s the white man’s burden to save its people from ignorance and tribalism. They base their judgment on a myth about Afghanistan.

  When I met Darya, I held these same beliefs about the country. I was immediately attracted to the young girl because she was a mystery and a victim who needed to be saved from barbaric traditions. I thought it was my job as an outsider from the West to rescue her. But as I traveled and got to know the country, the myth unraveled to reveal a complex nation and people.

  Afghanistan is like many other impoverished nation-states that suffer from illiteracy, strife, and instability. But it has had its periods of peace and stability, such as the forty years under King Zahir. Throughout history, conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and even the British have influenced the culture and ethnic makeup of the country. The American historian Thomas Barfield concludes that Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires but rather the cradle of them. Afghans are diverse as a result of various conquests and their ability to co-opt various cultures.

  What makes the country unique and prone to war is its geographic location and its role as a buffer zone. The misery of Afghanistan for the past two hundred years can be summarized as a result of internal neglect and foreign interference. The myth has had its validity at points in the country’s history. At times Afghanistan has been romantic and mysterious; its people can be fierce warriors, independent and resilient. But these descriptions should not become fixed ideas invoked to understand or analyze the country. True, Afghans have their cultural characteristics, but their culture and identities are fluid and cannot be categorized with simplistic stereotypes. American and British policies and military strategies have been based on these perceived notions, as if Afghans were not capable of change or progress, as if they were frozen in time and with tribal mentalities.

  Darya is no longer a mystery or a victim I must liberate. She’s one of thousands of girls bartered as opium brides, a casualty of an international drug problem. I remember all of the people I’ve met across Afghanistan who were impacted by the opium trade, from the farmer to the addict. Each person helped me understand the effects of the trade in a different way. But Darya had something special about her, a will to resist not just an outsider but also an internal family struggle—the injustice of forced marriage. It is that characteristic that allows me to come to terms with the end of my search. She will rescue herself, perhaps by learning to cope, by standing her ground with her husband, or even by running away. Darya offers hope for change. I will always want to know what happened to her, and perhaps someday I will.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Letting Go

  The Karzai government has lost any legitimacy it may have had among the poor and uneducated. The rising corruption, inflation, and insecurity in Afghanistan are building Taliban confidence. The militia has penetrated all parts of the country, paying its recruits more than what the Afghan police or army receives. The Obama administration has taken a practical approach, deciding to begin pulling out its troops in July 2011, ending ten years of military conflict, the same amount of time the Soviets spent in the country. The Karzai government is holding secret talks with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia to persuade them to join the government. The Taliban demand complete withdrawal of foreign troops, which more than likely will ignite another gruesome civil war.

  The Taliban movement has spread beyond the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Various factions make up the insurgency in both countries, but all of them advocate a radical practice of Islam that advocates the removal of women from public space and no interference from Western governments. Al Qaeda is linked with the Taliban but has its own international agenda. The United States killed its leader, bin Laden, in a raid on May 1, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He was living in a mansion in the city known for its government military training school. Pakistan came under attack for protecting him for ten years while the U.S. was hunting him, but the Pakistan government denied the charge. Al Qaeda continues to use the tribal border area in Pakistan for training camps, preparing operations, and recruitment for attacks against the United States and other Western countries, even without bin Laden.

  More and more Afghans in the southern countryside are calling for the return of the Taliban. But not the urban educated, who are frightened of a future without economic or educational opportunities. Drugs will become the staple of the economy again. At least with a foreign presence, more schools are being built, women can attend those schools in secure areas, and a sporadic job market and foreign aid and investment support a proportion of the population.

  Yet even with the Karzai government, the drug trade is penetrating deeper into all ranks of the government. In 2007 poppy production peaked, with 477,000 acres producing 8,200 tons of opium, half of it in Helmand. The United States and Britain are
finally tackling the fact that the Taliban are using drug money to buy weapons, fund logistics, and pay their fighters. The U.S. State Department and the Pentagon have begun to collaborate effectively to fight drugs in Afghanistan, and in 2007 the United States allocated $600 million for the mission. NATO and the U.S. Marines have become directly involved by targeting traffickers, and in 2008, with the help of Afghan police, they assassinated Mullah Osman, a major Taliban smuggler. But the shift in discussion becomes skewed by the politics of war. Until 2007 the United States underemphasized the connection between drug profits and the insurgency. Now policymakers overstress it. The drawback to this is that Afghanistan’s government brokers who are involved in the drug trade consolidate their power without much competition. The foreign powers leave them alone, but they target the insurgency’s drug profits.

  A controversial UN report published in August 2007 states that the counternarcotics strategy worked in central and northern Afghanistan, where, ironically, there is more poverty than in the south. The report concludes that relative security, local leadership, and incentives for farmers reduced poppy farming and that thirteen provinces are poppy free. It claims that the breadbasket of the country, the southwest, which includes Helmand and Kandahar, produced most of the opium, a supply fueled by greed, not need. The report’s authors criticize the weak eradication effort—only 10 percent of poppy fields—and advocate an aggressive poppy destruction campaign in the southwest region. The U.S. government backs the report, and Thomas Schweich, the American former counternarcotics coordinator for Afghanistan, publicly emphasizes eradication, claiming that the poor Afghan farmer is a myth.

  What the report ignores is that forced suppression has been proven a failure not just in Afghanistan but also in other poppy- producing countries, such as Colombia and Burma. International opinion overemphasizes the Taliban link to drugs to divert attention from the proliferation of drug dealing inside the Afghan government, as practiced by Ahmed Wali Karzai. Sharecroppers in Helmand may be as poor as farmers in Balkh in the north. The local leaders who enforce eradication use coercive methods that disregard human rights. In Balkh province, Atta Mohammad Noor, the mujahideen-appointed governor, successfully eliminated poppy farming and replaced it with cannabis cultivation.

  From 2008 to 2010, poppy production dropped 22 percent and twenty provinces in the north were declared poppy free. But this is a temporary fix. The large opium output in 2007 caused a drop in prices because of an oversupply in the market, just as in any other business. Another drought hit, and wheat prices rose nearly 200 percent.

  Farmers in some provinces pursue poppy cultivation for simple business reasons. They say they will farm again when opium prices go up and wheat goes down. That trend is confirmed by a 2010 UN opium survey: three of the twenty poppy-free provinces have reverted to opium cultivation.

  The serious shift in policy occurred when Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s late special envoy to Afghanistan, took charge in 2009. Forced eradication was reduced, and farmers were offered alternative seeds and fertilizer for voluntary eradication. A list was drafted of the fifty top traffickers for the United States to hunt down and execute, and the combined efforts of NATO and the U.S. military with the Afghan counternarcotics agents resulted in large seizures of stash houses and precursor chemicals. The response drove opium markets to operate in secret, the price of precursor chemicals rose—500 percent for acetic anhydride—and processing labs moved to more clandestine mountain hideaways. The drug industry is resilient and adaptable. The withdrawal of foreign troops in Afghanistan, which began in July 2011, will be a setback for counternarcotics efforts.

  A sustainable, long-term plan to curtail the drug industry should focus on the bigger issues of stability and security. An emphasis on unity and national identity under a federalist system that does not insist on central control but rather on provincial power may work best in Afghanistan. King Zahir did not force centralization during his forty-year peaceful reign.

  Other countries solved their drug problems after establishing a certain level of stability that allowed for alternative economic opportunities. If Karzai and the Taliban reach an agreement on government sharing, the Taliban should receive incentives to stop protecting drug traffickers. The Taliban’s relationship with the Quetta Alliance, the powerful Pakistani smuggling mafia, is tricky because the Alliance can easily turn against the Taliban for blocking trafficking routes and form a militia to attack them. But if an international peacekeeping group protects the future Afghan government, which would include the Taliban, the plan could work. Some traffickers, including those in the current government who have shown an interest in being a part of the reconstruction process, should not be assassinated but rather persuaded to negotiate with the government, and their influence should be leveraged. They should reinvest their drug funds in developing Afghanistan in the same manner as Haji Barat of Badakhshan and Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Nangarhar province. Sherzai, who has been accused of being a drug smuggler himself in the past, has had success in convincing Nangarhar farmers to curtail poppy growth. Those drug funds are being funneled to the Arab Gulf now.

  Voluntary eradication should continue, and forced eradication should target the small number of wealthy landowners. Farmers should continue to receive alternative seeds and fertilizer, but they should also have access to a fair and legal banking system. The salaam system they borrow under now treats them like indentured servants; under that system they rarely have enough money to pay back their loans. Once a stable government is in place, perhaps some farmers can produce opium for pharmaceutical opiates under government regulation.

  Internationally, the drug trade is propelled by demand, and every counternarcotics agent I speak with says that their law enforcement activities have minimal impact because the answer to reducing drug trafficking lies in demand reduction. More addicts in the world demand more drugs. Addiction rates for heroin are soaring worldwide. The most effective way to deal with addiction in some countries is tolerance, treatment, and legalization. Holland and Portugal have lower addiction rates because they have decriminalized the use of narcotics.

  Afghanistan’s drug trade can become irrelevant over time, a generation’s time. It took Thailand thirty years to solve its opium conundrum. It has taken Afghanistan that long to build a strong opium trade, and it should be expected that it will take the country at least that long to destroy it. There are no short cuts, quick fixes, or shock-and-awe solutions.

  It’s a sweaty September morning in Kabul, about seven thirty, the hour at which civil servants and law enforcement officials commute to work in their employers’ buses or vans, the hour at which Kabul residents expect to hear a bang reverberate through the walls.

  The hour when suicide bombers blow themselves up.

  It happens: the sound, the cacophony that follows, and then the silence. One big explosion, the third one this summer, the lovely summer of 2007, when the pomegranates on the tree in the front yard are beginning to ripen, when little boys fly kites on their rooftops, when the baby inside me has begun to kick. The summer I bid farewell to Afghanistan.

  The explosion is audible but too far away to shake the windows. It’s Ramadan, a couple of weeks before Eid. My husband, Naeem, is fasting and busy on his laptop. Naeem, the IT technician I met at UNHCR in Herat, moved to Kabul in the fall of 2005, and after four years of friendship, we decided to get married. I went to Afghanistan in search of my roots and I found the warmth, acceptance, and commitment I was looking for in him. In 2006 we had an Afghan engagement party and nikah (Islamic marriage ceremony) in Herat for the standard 850 friends and family. We arrived from the capital to find that my in-laws had seen to all the details and had even made the two gowns I would wear, one pink satin and the other a shimmering baby blue. The female guests remained on the top floor of the wedding hall, and the male guests on the bottom, with only the close male relatives of the bride and groom able to join the women’s section. The event, complete with a live band, f
our-course meal, and videographers, lasted the entire day.

  Naeem works for a Danish NGO, which is housing us in a comfortable three-bedroom home with a small garden in Qala-e-Fatullah, a quiet, clean neighborhood in Kabul. I’m lazily getting out of bed. As soon as I hear the bomb, my pace shifts. I slip on my jeans, wrap on a head scarf, and grab my purse. My large suitcase is lying on the floor half full. Today is my day to pack and do one last story, a positive article about a clandestine music school where women are taking voice lessons and learning to play musical instruments. But the plan has just changed. I run downstairs and ask Naeem, “You want to come with me to the bomb site?” It’s his day off from work and I don’t want us to spend a minute apart, because I’m leaving and he’s staying for a few months.

  Naeem and I arrive late at the site of the explosion, which is at my old neighborhood in the Baharistan bazaar in Karte Parwan. It’s also the market where I witnessed a drug bust by counternarcotics agents. Authorities have cleaned up the bodies and blood from the street, but shattered glass is still strewn across the sidewalk. I soon learn that the suicide bomber, dressed in Afghan Army fatigues, boarded an Afghan National Army bus while soldiers were boarding and detonated his bomb, killing twenty-nine people. Among the sixteen injured are two boys and their father, a sidewalk shoe shiner. The bomber killed sixteen soldiers. The insurgents have been infiltrating the Afghan police and military inside Kabul simply by wearing army uniforms and then setting off the explosives strapped to their bodies. I walk around the site in a daze, interviewing witnesses.

  The windows of the bakery where I used to buy bread and cookies are broken. I kick away some pieces of glass as I enter. The owner smiles and greets me. He’s busy tending to customers who are buying sweets for Eid. The broken glass is the only reminder of an abnormal day. I ask him what happened.