Opium Nation Read online

  Three thousand years ago, opium was traded along the Silk Road, which included modern-day Afghanistan. But it was Genghis Khan who introduced poppy farming to Afghanistan, when the Mongol conqueror built an empire there in the thirteenth century. For centuries poppy cultivation remained limited to medicinal use and was locally consumed. Its trade, however, flourished in the 1800s after Afghanistan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan relocated—by force, in some cases—Pashtun tribes to the non-Pashtun borders of Afghanistan with Iran and Central Asia. The king’s motives were twofold: to disperse Pashtun tribes who were rebelling against his nationalist policies, and to place an ethnic division between his neighbors to the west and north, who claimed rights to lands inside Afghanistan inhabited by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. Abdur Rahman Khan’s most detrimental pact was the Durand Line. The displaced Pashtuns had little access to resources or legitimate jobs. Many of the tribes therefore turned to smuggling goods across the borders. In Iran, Afghans found a growing market for opium, hashish, and other narcotics among the many commodities, including green tea and spices, they smuggled across the border on donkeys or on their own backs to avoid import and export taxes.

  In 1958, King Mohammed Zahir outlawed the cultivation and consumption of opium but did not enforce the ban, perhaps because it was a contained problem. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Afghanistan produced one hundred to one hundred fifty tons of opium consistently to meet Iran’s demand. Still, cannabis farming was more popular; 30 percent of the global hashish supply was cultivated in Afghanistan in the same time period. Afghanistan was on the hippie trail then, with tourists arriving partly to smoke hashish and opium.

  Antinarcotics policies did not challenge drugs in Afghanistan until 1971, when the United States confronted hashish trafficking syndicates in Kabul and provided aid for the Afghan government to fight the trade. In 1973, in one of the last royal decrees before Daud Khan ousted King Zahir, the ban on opium and hashish was reissued, and forced eradication cleared out the cannabis farms. But Afghanistan’s economy did not depend solely on drug exports then. It was the Communist coup of 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion that changed the magnitude of the drug trade.

  As happened in Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Colombia, and other parts of the world, in Afghanistan illicit drugs began to finance war. (The other similarity with the conflicts in the aforementioned countries is that they were proxy wars fought between the United States and the Soviet Union.) In Afghanistan, the CIA chose to support the most radical guerrilla leader, and a known trafficker, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in the war against the Soviets. Pakistanis who had become experienced in farming and smuggling opium inside their own country helped Afghans learn the techniques. Seeds were loaned to poor Afghan farmers to start the process. If they made a profit, they could pay back the loan and keep some of the revenue. If there was no harvest, farmers still had to repay the loan, in cash. If they didn’t have the cash, they bartered their belongings and property.

  The Soviet invasion destroyed traditional farming and replaced it with poppy cultivation. But it wasn’t just the war that increased the drug trade. In Helmand province, American agricultural aid projects from the 1950s had advocated modern farming techniques on incompatible soil. These techniques led to eroded soil, which made it possible for only a few crops to grow—the most lucrative of which was poppy. Also in Helmand, mujahideen commander Mullah Nasim forced farmers to grow opium. The mujahideen and their cohorts discovered the lucrative benefits of heroin. As poppy farming took root across the country—in the east in Nangarhar province and in the north in Badakhshan and Balkh provinces—Afghanistan eventually turned into a one-stop shop for drugs: the opium was cultivated there, processed into heroin, and then trafficked. When the mujahideen were in power in the early 1990s, most of the opium was processed into a crude form of heroin in Pakistan, but under the Taliban, heroin labs moved to Afghanistan. Once the Soviets left, the mujahideen and then the Taliban continued to reap the profits.

  The opium trade prospers in lawless countries, and thirty years of strife in Afghanistan turned that country into a major producer of opium in the mid-1980s. It’s now labeled a narco state in which drug lords and traffickers control both the economy and law enforcement. The United Nations estimates that the Afghan opium trade supplies fifteen million addicts worldwide and kills one hundred thousand people a year. More Russians die from addiction to Afghan opiates every year than the total number of Soviet soldiers killed (fifteen thousand) during the Soviet-Afghan War. In 2010, Russia reported thirty thousand deaths caused by drugs that originated in Afghanistan. About 6.4 percent of Afghanistan’s population is involved in the drug trafficking chain, and the overall international trade in Afghan opiates is worth $65 billion annually. With each border crossing heading west, the price of the drug rises. A kilo of heroin, an extract of opium, which sells for $3,000 in Afghanistan, can be worth as much as $50,000 by the time it reaches the United States.

  The year I was born, 1973, was the end of forty years of relative peace in Afghanistan, one of the longest in the country’s contemporary history. King Zahir, the reigning monarch, had managed a sporadically centralized government that focused on modernizing the country. Since Zahir was only nineteen when he was crowned in 1933, he turned his authority over to two paternal uncles until the 1960s. In 1964 his government drafted a new constitution, the same document that my grandfather Abdul Karim Ahrary (Baba Monshi) approved with a group of Afghanistan’s progressive thinkers. The constitution made primary education obligatory for all children; gave women the right to vote, attend school, and work; and called for democratic elections for a national parliament. The first institute of higher education, Kabul University, had been established in 1932, but it excelled in academic achievement during Zahir’s rule.

  Zahir’s critics say there was peace during his tenure but little progress. Afghanistan remained poor and fragmented, and ethnic tensions brewed between Pashtuns, the ethnic group to which Zahir belonged, and other ethnic factions. Nepotism, inefficiency, class differences, and ethnic isolation paved the way for the king’s ouster in 1973.

  Foreign intervention for strategic interests has continually fueled ethnic tensions inside Afghanistan. No reliable statistics exist on the current population’s ethnic makeup, partly because so many Afghans, especially in urban centers, have mixed ethnic backgrounds. (For example, I’m a mix of Tajik and Pashtun.) But in Afghanistan, perception is more important than fact, and it is the perception of ethnicity and ethnic loyalty that drives relations.

  Pashtuns consider themselves the majority, but they could very well be the biggest minority in the country. Some Afghanistan experts say no majority ethnic group exists in the country, while others argue that Pashtuns comprise the largest population. The consensus is that Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Turkmen are minority groups. Whatever the case may be, throughout Afghanistan’s history the ruling class has been Pashtun, with the exception of one leader, who was on the throne for only four months, in 1929. As a result, other ethnic groups have been marginalized.

  My eighty-year-old father remembers his early years in school, from 1936 to 1946, when, under Zahir, the language instruction across the country changed suddenly from Farsi to Pashto. “The teachers didn’t speak Pashto in the north and Kabul, so education stopped,” he told me. “It made no sense. It was stubbornness on the part of the ruling elite to enforce their language, despite the fact that even the king spoke Farsi at home.”

  Mohammed Daud Khan, Zahir’s cousin, thought of the king as ineffectual and weak. Zahir fired Daud from the position of prime minister a decade before Daud rallied support from Afghan leftists and military conservatives to oust the king in a bloodless coup: in July 1973, while Zahir was in Italy receiving eye treatment, Daud seized power. Instead of fighting back, Zahir abdicated and stayed in exile until 2002. When he returned, he was named the honorary father of the nation. When he passed away in 2007, he was one of the few contemporary Afghan leaders who died of old age. The majority
were murdered.

  In 1965 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the first Communist Party in the country, formed and held regular meetings. Before the coup, Daud befriended them, but after he was in power, he purged the growing number of Soviet-educated Afghan Communists from his government. He established one party and declared Afghanistan a republic. Though Daud was a nationalist who opposed foreign intervention, Afghanistan received aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States—however, during Daud’s five years in power it was more dependent on, and closer to, the Soviet Union. Daud’s closeness to Moscow made Washington, Tehran, and Islamabad—all allies at the time—nervous. Daud’s vision of a united Afghanistan with a strong central government was not in the interests of Pakistan or the United States.

  Beginning in the 1960s, students at Polytechnic University and Kabul University, where my paternal uncle Fazel Ahmed Ahrary taught pharmacy, were becoming highly politicized, influenced by various international ideologies. While thousands of students turned to communism, the most famous leaders of the mujahideen, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, were inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and began their Islamic activism during their years at the university.

  Pakistan welcomed the two Islamic agitators and assigned a Pakistani general known as Colonel Imam (born Sultan Amir Tarar), who had been trained by the American Green Berets, to train them. At the time, Pakistan was hurting from the loss of East Pakistan, which had declared independence in 1971 as Bangladesh and was struggling with its own Baloch and Pashtun ethnic groups, who also wanted independence.

  With President Richard Nixon in the throes of a losing war in Vietnam, Daud’s friendly relations with the Soviet Union were causing a quiet uproar in Washington, which led to support for the Islamists being groomed in Pakistan. In 1975, Pakistan returned Hekmatyar and Massoud to Afghanistan, where they tried to rally uprisings against Daud in the Panjshir Valley and Laghman. But the locals refused. Afghans enjoyed peace, and the dearth of religious motivation at the time—no infidels or foreign powers were on Afghan soil—delayed the inevitable coup that the Afghan Communists would execute. After the failed attempt, Daud threw the two Islamists out of Afghanistan—he believed in the separation of church and state and had no tolerance for religious militancy. The pair went back to Pakistan.

  The Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) broke into two factions, the Khalq and the Parcham. The former consisted of primarily Pashtun laborers and farmers, and the latter included elites and intellectuals from the various Afghan ethnicities. Khalq believed in building a strong working class to achieve a Marxist revolution, and Parcham thought Afghanistan was not ready for a traditional Marxist revolution; Afghans had to be patriotic and anti-imperialist first. However, the ideological differences were merely a front for the personality clash between the two leaders who headed the parties. Nur Mohammed Taraki was the leader of the Khalqis, and Babrak Karmal was the head of the Parchamists.

  In 1978 the two parties set aside their differences and united to kill Daud and force a socialist revolution in Afghanistan.

  On April 27, 1978, I’m with my family at a wedding in Lashkargah city, in the southern province of Helmand, where my dad works for the fertilizer company. Dressed in a frilly spaghetti-strap dress, I’m digging my fingers into a frosty piece of wedding cake when the music suddenly stops and there are whispers among the women guests.

  “The president has been killed. The Communists are in the palace,” the whispers echo.

  My five-year-old fingers freeze, and I search for my mother. “Don’t worry. Everything’s okay,” she says, hugging me.

  But it isn’t okay. My father is abruptly transferred by his new Communist bosses to Kandahar province, and we have to move. He works in Kandahar for only a year, then puts in a request to be transferred to our home province, Herat.

  In April 1978, Taraki became the Afghan president and exiled Karmal, assigning him the ambassadorship in Czechoslovakia. Hafizullah Amin, known for being the most wicked and ambitious member of the Khalq Party, was named foreign minister and, later, prime minister. Over the next year, Taraki and Amin enforced a series of changes that upset Afghans. The government killed the feudal landowners, or buried them alive with bulldozers, to seize their properties. Any opposition to the government was quelled with imprisonment or execution. Every large family in the diaspora that my family knows is missing a member who was jailed and then vanished—and that’s just from April 1978 to December 1979. My uncle Fazel Ahmed Ahrary, who taught at Kabul University, disappeared in 1979.

  The Afghan secret police, guided by the Soviet KGB, were responsible for rounding up the opposition in Afghanistan. Assadullah Sarwary, a key member of the Khalq Party, who later became the head of the brutal secret police, tells me in a jailhouse interview in Kabul in 2007 that Afghan Marxists could not commit to their ideology. “Afghans are not capable of breaking away from their nationalist sentiments, so we were never true Communists.” Sarwary is the only man in jail for war crimes from the Soviet era in Kabul. He is on death row.

  My Uncle Fazel disappeared during the time Sarwary controlled the secret police. My uncle’s wife and five children now live in the United States and Japan. Fazel was not a Communist, but he had friends who were Maoists, a faction banned altogether by the Khalq government. Guilt by association may have been the reason he was jailed.

  “Did you know Fazel Ahmed Ahrary?” I ask Sarwary.

  He pauses for a minute and shakes his head. I tell Sarwary that Fazel was my uncle and that he disappeared during his tenure as chief of the secret police. “Do you know where those who disappeared are buried?”

  “I don’t know anything. If I killed anyone, slaughter me,” he responds angrily, gesturing with his finger as if using a knife to cut his own throat.

  I find out through my uncle’s students at Kabul University that Sarwary’s secret police most likely tortured my uncle to death.

  In March 1979 the Khalqis tried to enforce women’s liberation in Herat. The government’s campaign for literacy obliged women to participate alongside men. The action offended conservatives in Herat enough for them to launch the first serious uprising against the regime, which came as a shock to everyone. Heratis are known as polite, small-statured Afghans with an affinity for literature and trade.

  A division of the Afghan Army mutinied and joined the mujahideen rebels, who stole weapons stockpiles and murdered government officials, Soviet diplomats, advisers, and their families. People tortured the accused in public and displayed their bodies on pikes. Taraki called for help from the Soviet military, but Moscow refused. For seventy-two hours Kabul could not control Herat. Taraki responded by ordering the Afghan military to bomb from the air and shoot from the ground. An estimated five thousand people died.

  At the time of the attacks, my father, mother, sister, and I were in Lashkargah, but my brother, Hadi, a charming musician disinterested in politics, was visiting our relatives in Herat, on holiday from Kabul University. Hadi, now a fifty-seven-year-old businessman in Fremont, California, recounts his memory of those nightmarish three days:

  “At nine AM, villagers poured into the city from all sides. There were rumors that people would protest, but few thought it would be so organized and violent. Farmers held their shovels and pickaxes, ready to strike. First they seized the governor’s office. The Khalqis in the offices ran away or hid in the Friday Mosque. They killed who they could find. The government announced martial law, but that’s when the army mutinied and the violence worsened, because now the mob had guns. Then the planes began bombing.”

  Hadi went to Haji Baba’s, our maternal grandfather’s orchard home, and hid there with the family for a week. Families in the area climbed onto their roofs after the bombings stopped, to talk and exchange food and supplies. Some houses in Herat were connected to each other, with no divisions. The roofs provided open access to communication. After three days, the violence lessened. People picked up th
eir dead, and heavy rains washed away the blood. Then the regime began to round up anybody who had participated in the uprising. My brother returned to Kabul as soon as the siege ended.

  In Kabul, Amin plotted a coup against Taraki and his ministers. In August 1979 he persuaded enough officials inside the government to proceed with an overthrow. Taraki was arrested, then smothered to death with a pillow in Kabul’s notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Moscow was outraged by Taraki’s death, seeing Amin as too brash and power hungry. The Soviet leadership wanted him deposed. They planned a large operation, executing Amin and his family inside the historic Tajbeg Palace on December 27, 1979, and deploying eighty thousand troops to Afghanistan. They then repatriated Karmal and installed him as president of Afghanistan.

  When the initial bloodbath was over, the Soviets released thousands of political prisoners as a goodwill gesture. But it was too late. The Soviet invasion spurred Afghans across all sectors to take up arms and join the guerrillas under the banner of jihad, or holy war. The seven mujahideen factions divided by ethnicity and language who had earlier banded together to battle the Communists now had a tougher enemy, the “infidel Russians,” and a stronger devotion to defeating them.

  Washington became heavily involved during the Reagan administration, with lobbying from Senator Charlie Wilson. Guns, Stinger missiles, mines, grenades, and a cocktail of other weapons were channeled through Pakistan and its intelligence service, the ISI. Mules were provided to transport the weapons to the rebels. Arabs and other Muslim militants, including Osama bin Laden, traveled to the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border to train and fight against the Soviets. The ISI provided training, while China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States donated money for what became a pan-Islamic cause. The rebels were smuggling opium and heroin to make money, and the CIA, well aware of this fact, ignored it. By some accounts, the CIA helped the mujahideen smuggle out narcotics and fund heroin laboratories. The U.S. attorney general gave the CIA legal exemption from reporting drug smuggling by its agents, officers, or assets as the mujahideen found ways to hook Soviet troops on fine-grade heroin. Russian soldiers had to be sent back to the Soviet Union due to addiction. According to authors Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, President Reagan approved Operation Mosquito, a French-hatched plan to distribute heroin and fake Russian newspaper articles emphasizing Soviet losses in the war to Soviet troops in the battlefield. The motives were to lower morale and encourage addiction to heroin, similar to what the Viet Cong did to Americans during the Vietnam War. Asad and Harris write that the CIA executed the plan with the aid of a mujahideen leader and French journalists who had access to the troops inside Afghanistan.