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ASIA
MARCH 22, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 11
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At the same time, the crackdown in neighboring Pakistan has enlarged the scope of drug activity in Afghanistan. Tiny heroin labs like those the Taliban destroyed last month first sprang up in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province in the early 1980s. In recent years, as active-duty army officers have assumed control over Islamabad's drug-interdiction efforts, those "factories" have been driven onto Afghan soil (although the drug barons who own them remain secure in heavily guarded, high-walled compounds in Pakistan itself). "Afghanistan could now be making all the illegal heroin that formerly came from Pakistan," says Bernard Frahi, a representative of the United Nations International Drug Control Program.
The grim harvest has the same primary destination as usual: Western Europe, which obtains 80% of its heroin from the Golden Crescent. But many shipments have taken up new routes. In the past, smugglers slipped into Iran, sailed out from Karachi or took advantage of the maze of trails and dry riverbeds in the Himalayan foothills and the barren desert in Rajasthan to sneak into India, where they shipped the drugs out of Bombay or New Delhi. Now that surrounding countries have begun to tighten their porous borders, however, up to 65% of the region's opium and processed heroin is being moved through Central Asian republics like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan--and then sent onward through Russia and the Baltic States to Western Europe.
Taliban officials say they would raze the country's poppy fields far more quickly if the international community would fund crop-substitution programs and, importantly, recognize the regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. "The farmers would happily give up poppy cultivation if it provided alternate means of livelihood," says Abdul Hamid Akhundzada, the Taliban's high commissioner for drug control. The claim is dubious: according to the White House, opium is Afghanistan's largest cash crop, and "perhaps the largest source of income" in the country. And the Taliban's unsavory reputation continues to scare off potential international donors for Afghanistan's anti-narcotics efforts. U.N. officials have been able to drum up only $10 million in funding for this purpose, compared with $200 million pledged for projects in the tribal belt of Pakistan. The UNDCP has begun two limited crop-substitution programs in Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, and Akhundzada says the regime is eagerly awaiting results. One hopes they will be more impressive than previous efforts.
Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar
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R E L A T E D
L I N K S :
Wrath of God
Osama bin Laden lashes out against the West in an exclusive interview
--TIME Asia, Jan. 11, 1999
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Bin Laden-Taliban Clash Poses U.S. Dilemma
Is the U.S. better off capturing Bin Laden or having him hobbled by the Taliban?
--TIME Daily, March 4, 1998
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