Reporting from Afghanistan

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HEROIN FOR ALLAH
Fanatical Muslims push opium between prayers
Report by James Emery

Farida's slender body jerks forward with each stroke of the whip. The young girl's penalty of 100 lashes is for committing an unpardonable offense: walking with a man she is not related to. Farida's limp form hangs from a crude, wooden post; a mixture of blood and sweat seeps through the young girl's garments. Standing beside her is an Islamic cleric, who loudly denounces Farida's sin and warns of the dreaded consequences of invoking Taliban justice.

The Taliban, Islamic zealots who control 90% of Afghanistan, regularly pack cheering crowds into Kabul Sports Stadium to watch as fornicators are flogged, thieves have their right hands and left feet cut off, and murderers are gunned down by relatives of the deceased. The same brutal form of justice is meted out at villages throughout the country. Adulterers are stoned to death, with entire villages, including women and children, being encouraged to participate.

"The killing is good," says one Afghan villager who has taken part in rajm, the public stoning of an adulterous couple. "it keeps people obedient."

The influence of the Taliban stretches as far as the United States to pollute the lives of Christians and unbelievers. How many infidel junkies realize that policies carried out by Islam's servants have opened the floodgates of the very dope they shoot into their veins? To fund their religious revolution, the Taliban deal in opiates-opium, morphine base and heroin-in spite of Islamic prohibitions against drugs.

Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in 1979, sparking a brutal and bloody conflict that lasted for ten years and displaced 3.5 million refugees. In the hundreds of squalid refugee camps that straddled the Pakistani border, anti-Western Islamic clerics organized and groomed Taliban militants to one day take control of Afghanistan.

Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989; three years later, the Marxist Najibullah regime fell, and civil war broke out among competing Afghan political parties. When the Taliban captured the capital city of Kabul on September 27, 1996, the fundamentalist leadership immediately imposed a twisted version of sharia, strict Islamic law, on the war-weary populace.

God's work, for the Taliban, involves outlawing everything from cassette tapes to razors. Even flying kites is forbidden, because such frivolous distractions might interrupt prayers. Women are not allowed to work or attend school and are forced to wear a burqa, a garment that covers the body from head to toe. Men must wear skullcaps or turbans, grow beards and pray at a mosque five times a day. Failure to comply with strictures such as these could result in severe beatings, sometimes given on the spot, at the hands of roving bands of Taliban thugs.

What a Western observer might describe as human-rights abuses are carried out by the Taliban in the name of Allah. The inverted ethical code under which Afghanistan's 18 million people exist extends beyond morality into the realm of economics. Just over a year after Taliban soldiers conquered the provinces south of the Hindu Kush mountain range, opium production reached 2,800 tons, a sevenfold increase from before the Taliban seized power. Estimates derived from CIA satellite photography indicate that nearly 100,000 acres of poppies are currently under cultivation in areas under Taliban control.

According to United Nations figures, Afghanistan is the largest single producer of opium in the world. Before 1996, while still fighting to consolidate control of the country, the Taliban taxed opium growers, refiners and smugglers. According to the Cooperative Center for Afghanistan, a nonprofit investigative group, the Taliban tax amounts to about $48 per kilogram of opium produced. Drugs continue to fund Afghanistan's government to this day.

With an eye toward India, the jewel of the subcontinent, Alexander the Great, Darius I and Genghis Khan poured through Peshawar, Pakistan, a bustling border town near the Khyber Pass. Hundreds of years later, Peshawar became the home of seven official Afghan political parties waging war against the Russian invasion army.

Before dawn on a recent winter morning, I shiver with cold in the Dabgari Gardens section of Peshawar, awaiting a group of smugglers who have agreed to let me tag along with them as they trek into Nangarhar, the second-largest opium-producing province in Afghanistan. An estimated 120 rudimentary opium labs are sprinkled throughout the mountainous region. I hope to reach one of these crude factories where opium is processed into morphine base and heroin; there, I will be able to have a firsthand look at the building blocks of the international narcotics trade.

Across the street from where I wait, bakers slap slabs of wheat dough into large, underground ovens to make nan, a thick, chewy bread that is a staple of the Afghan diet. As the fire crackles in the still, cool air, a Japanese pickup truck arrives to take me across the border. Fierce Pathan tribesmen sit on wooden crates in the back of the truck. The scruffy warriors are armed with Soviet-style AK-47 automatic rifles; ammo belts holding extra clips are strapped around their chests. Smuggling can be tough business, and this group is ready for anything.

We ease through Pakistani military checkpoints and into Afghanistan without incident, even though our vehicle is loaded with boxes of land mines, crates of machine guns and squat, maroon drums of plastic explosives. At a remote base camp several hundred miles south of Kabul, 20 more Pathan tribesmen join the group of smugglers. Morning prayers are in order, and the gang of smugglers removes its shoes, lining up to face Mecca and offer homage to Allah.

Once the prayers have concluded, the pious Muslim gunrunners unload the pickup truck, which turns back toward Pakistan. The roads at this point are impassable, even for a sturdy 4 x 4, and we will walk the rest of the way to Nangarhar, humping the guns and munitions on an age-old smuggling route that snakes across valleys and through mountains.

Walking in single file, we maneuver through dry streambeds and open fields, careful to avoid the land mines and unexploded ordnance that litter the countryside-souvenirs left by the Soviets. We reach a small village and stop at a dilapidated restaurant for tea and nan. The pungent odor of kerosene lanterns and wood smoke from cooking fires hangs in the air. The shop owner and his son eye our group warily, avoiding small talk. Merchants know better than to pry into the activities of strangers, especially when the strangers are well armed.

Since my Dari is limited, I rely on Haroon, my interpreter, to ask my companions questions about the drug route.

"Our trail has been used for many years to haul everything: cigarettes, household goods, drugs and weapons," says Aziz, one of the older Afghans. Aziz explains that the lowest tier of the drug trade is made up of growers, refiners and smugglers from rural areas, who struggle to provide their families with the basics of food, clothing and shelter.

Afghan peasants typically have little to no education and couldn't care less about the global impact of the drug trade or the moral implications of their product. No one a methadone clinic, but the rugged pragmatists know which cargo is most profitable and most in demand.

As night falls, we snake in single file over the foothills until we come across a crude, mud-and-straw dwelling. Several armed tribesmen greet us, and we're ushered inside. The medieval-looking hovel is long and narrow, an oasis providing food and shelter for the smugglers and soldiers of Islam.

According to reports from the Bureau of international Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), in late 1997, a highranking Taliban official acknowledged that the tax collected by local mullahs on opium crops amounts to 10% of the crop's wholesale value. The tax is for Allah, and the Taliban are his collectors.

While Taliban leaders openly admit to taxing the drug trade, the self-described holy men insist that their policies do not violate Islamic law. The teachings of Mohammed, however, proscribe the use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol.

The United Nations provides massive aid programs to Afghanistan at the same time that it tries to convince the Taliban to curtail opium production. More than $270 million is budgeted for Afghanistan in 1999, including $53.6 million in food aid. Money under this appropriation is provided for fertilizers, irrigation and related projects. Critics have charged that UN funds do little more than subsidize drug production by enabling farmers to grow opium instead of traditional crops, such as wheat, nuts, fruits and vegetables.

However, Taliban leaders would seem to have an incentive to crack down on the drug trade because the de facto government of Afghanistan desperately craves international recognition and a seat in the United Nations. Only Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan have extended full diplomatic relations to the Taliban. The Islam extremists have demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in additional aid from lending agencies before they will take steps to stop opium cultivation.

"We know it is very important to ban poppy cultivation," says Ahmed Muttawakil, a Taliban government spokesman. "It is not an easy thing to do." Muttawakil fears that an outright ban on poppy cultivation could lead to farmer unrest, but the Taliban have done little to support UN-sponsored alternative-crop programs. Perhaps Muttawakil is also concerned about the reported $20 to $50 million a Year the Taliban earn from the narcotics trade.

Dinner at the rest house on the smuggling route consists of tea, nan and Afghan soup, which amounts to animal fat mixed with boiling water. Everyone tears into the nan and dips the chewy bread into the soup, which has the appearance and consistency of 20-weight oil.

When leaves plug the spout of the tea kettle, one of the older smugglers, an ancient man with rotting teeth, puts the spout into his mouth to clear the obstruction. He politely refills my cup. I accept, but discretely pour the rank fluid on the dirt floor of the hut.

After dinner, some of the men smoke and talk about the opium trade. "I tell you this," says Akhil, an Afghan farmer. "No one can stop the farmers from growing opium. We depend on it for money. There is nothing else."

What Akhil says is not strictly accurate. Wheat and other crops can easily be grown, but they are not nearly as profitable as opium. Afghanistan's opium farmers, who number around 200,000, can receive loans on their crops; or, if the growers are desperate for money, they can sell part or all of their crop at a reduced price prior to harvest.

Haroon, my interpreter, believes that opium is a crop just like any other. "The West is the problem, not Afghanistan. It is the Americans and Europeans who abuse drugs."

At the mention of the United States, Gulam, a skinny, bearded smuggler in his mid-40s, looks up from the embers of the fire. "Why does America hate Islam?"

"It is the West that corrupts our country," adds Mohammed, Gulam's friend. In spite of U. S. support of the mujahideen, anti-Soviet freedom fighters, during the Afghan-Soviet war, many Afghans regard both the United States and the Soviet Union as enemies of Islam.

After dinner, we stretch out side by side in two long rows, heads against the outside wall, feet toward the center of the hovel. The hard, dirt floor is covered with a thin, straw mat. We use our coats for pillows and cover ourselves with pattou, medium-weight Afghan blankets. In spite of the loud snoring, sleep comes easily.

The next morning on the trail, it feels good to breathe fresh air after spending the night in crowded, smoky quarters. A couple of the Afghans cough up blood - probably tuberculosis, epidemic in parts of this country. The climb along the mountain trails is exausting; despite the cold, I'm soaked with sweat.

Although some of the smugglers wear only cheap, plastic shoes or worn, leather dress shoes without laces or socks, the sturdy porters, under loads of explosives and bullets, move at a steady pace and show no signs of fatigue. Our procession stops near a small stream where the hands and feet can be washed, as is customary prior to facing Mecca for prayers.

Back on the trail, we come across a village consisting of a few mud buildings, the type in which opium is processed into heroin before being sent back across the border to Pakistan. In places, fields of poppies stretch across the alpine valleys. We have arrived at the fringe of Afghanistan's drug-producing region.

A few days later, we reach a fortified bastion, a cross between a French Foreign Union post and a Taos pueblo. The stronghold consists of a series of one-story buildings surrounded by 20-foot wall with one entrance. Everything is made of the universal Afghan building materials: dirt, water and straw. Planking runs around the perimeter of the outer wall for shooters to defend the compound against attack. Each structure is divided into several rooms, some of which are used to store weapons and drugs; other rooms are sleeping quarters.

A well stands near the center of the compound. A ladle cut from an old tire is used to hoist muddy water, great quantities of which are used in the process of refining opium into morphine base. Foulsmelling 55-gallon drums of acetic anhydride, a chemical used in the refining process, stand behind the buildings.

I have reached one of the opium labs from which the international heroin trade originates. Workers refine the raw poppy bulbs in dark, poorly ventilated shops using Bronze Age technology. This tableau is a world away from the inner-city streets where junkies score smack, but the two worlds are intimately connected by the sinuous underground railroad of speedboats, secret airfields, middlemen and payoffs that makes up the global drug route.

Due to unexplained delays and sporadic fighting that closes one of the trails, what was meant to be a brief visit to Nangarhar becomes a two-month stretch of listless waiting for the next caravan traveling east. Finally, I join a group of smugglers who are taking a team of 30 horses burdened with tightly bound, 200-pound bundles of opium and 20-pound sacks of heroin back to Peshawar.

Politics and religion make for strange bedfellows; adding heroin to the mix makes for an even stranger menage a trois.

According to the World Geopolitics of Drugs (OGD), an international monitoring agency based in France, the bulk of the heroin produced and sold by the Taliban for their Islamic revolution passes to another group of Muslims half a continent away in Western Europe. Much of the Afghan opium, which accounts for 80% of Europe's heroin supply, travels into the former Yugoslav Republics.

Independent journalists have reported that Kosovar Albanians purchase Afghan heroin from Russian and Turkish dealers and smuggle the drugs into Europe with the help of Albanian enclaves in Germany, Switzerland and other countries. Albanians, who are predominantly Muslim, deal in heroin to support their cause: an independent Kosovo, blessed by Allah.

"To Albanians, smuggling and the black market are a way of life," says Mousli, a recent United States immigrant who fled the chaos in the former Yugoslav Republic. "Drugs simply offer more money than anything else; that's why they transport them."

The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the Albanians make up one of the largest heroin-smuggling networks in Europe. Some of the drug profits apparently support the Kosovo Liberation Army, championed by the U. S. government and media as freedom fighters.

An article that appeared in the London Times cited "growing evidence that drug money is funding the KLA!s leap from obscurity to power." The Times report indicates that as much as half of the funding for the KLA!s guerrilla war comes from drug proceeds. Profits do not come without a price though; hundreds of Albanian drug smugglers are incarcerated in European jails.

"Would I be shocked to find that people in the KLA are involved in drug trafficking in some way, either to make money or tell themselves they've got a cause where the ends justify the means? I'd be shocked to find out it wasn't true," says Sherman Hinson, policy planning coordinator with the INL, an expert on the international drug trade. "It's tremendously easy for anyone who wants to be a bandit to just claim he's a partisan. That was the situation through most of World War 11 in what was Yugoslavia."

Politicians and religious leaders can find a way to justify any activity no matter how illegal, by waving the flag of nationalism or invoking the name of God. And so it is with the Taliban and elements of the KLA, whose slogan might very well be: "Heroin for Allah, profits for us."

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