AN AFGHAN BOUNTY OF DRUGS

More Farmers Plant Poppies; Processing Labs Flourish

JATA, Afghanistan -- The village mullah and his superior are smeared
with fresh opium sap. It is harvest time, and the holy men are
laboring in their poppy field, breaking the laws of Islam and
Afghanistan to ease their poverty.

As the day wanes, they wait, fingers aching, for the ubiquitous young
men who cross the countryside on shiny new motorbikes, buying up the
deadly harvest reaped by local farmers.

"Of course it bothers me," said Mohammad Sarwar, 49, the mawlawi, or
authority on Islamic teachings, at the mosque in this tiny
northeastern village. "But we have to cultivate it in the current
situation where we've had to borrow money, sell household items and
don't have enough to eat. This is an emergency."

The drug trade in Afghanistan is growing more pervasive, powerful and
organized, its corrupting reach extending to all aspects of society,
according to dozens of interviews with international and Afghan
anti-narcotics workers, police, poppy farmers, government officials
and their critics.

Already the world's largest opium producer last year, Afghanistan
appears poised to produce another bumper crop. In rural areas where
wheat has historically been the dominant crop, fields of brilliant
red, pink and white poppies are proliferating. Many poor farmers, who
complain that the Afghan government and other countries have failed to
ease their economic woes through legal means, say that they are
growing illegal opium poppies for the first time.

At the same time, drug laboratories where raw opium is processed into
morphine or heroin -- once rare in Afghanistan -- are sprouting at an
unprecedented rate, police and anti-narcotics workers say. Many
authorities appear less inclined to combat new drug syndicates than to
share in their profits. The crude but money-making factories are
largely condoned by elders, unmolested by police and guarded by
militiamen and their commanders.

In the district of Daryian in Badakhshan province, police chief Abdul
Qadeer Raashed said in an interview that he had shut down and
destroyed all drug laboratories in villages under his control more
than one month ago, after local competitors accused him of running
labs and smuggling drugs.

But a Washington Post reporter who insisted on touring the supposedly
defunct laboratories with Qadeer on short notice found the four fire
pits of one, at a home in the village of Langar, still hot to the
touch and firewood smoldering outside.

Hidden in a storeroom and outbuildings -- along with the half-eaten
lunches of people who had clearly been working there a short time
before -- were the supplies and equipment needed to produce morphine
and heroin. Among them: dozens of empty oil barrels and still-damp
vats for mixing and boiling, sacks of lime, more than 50 bags of
chemicals such as ammonium chloride and filters for refining.

In the main house was a roster listing workers' names and duties,
instructions for using a satellite telephone, and -- hidden under a
mound of carpets and cushions -- bags of a brown powder that appeared
to be heroin. While the reporter searched the property, Qadeer stood
by, looking miserable.

"Come back in 48 hours," Qadeer said, "and I promise you, this will
all be gone."

'A Threat to Democracy' As Afghanistan tries to put two decades of
chaos and combat behind it and move toward rebuilding itself into a
stable country, the growing drug trade and the corruption it is
spawning threaten to make moot the ongoing debates over such basic
issues as law and governance. Left unchecked, worried critics say, it
will turn Afghanistan into a narco-mafia state.

Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani called the drug trade "a threat to
democracy" as Afghanistan tries to prepare for elections next year.
"Elections are expensive propositions," he said in an interview last
week in the capital, Kabul. "The liquid funds from drugs, in the
absence of solid institutions, could corrupt voting practices and turn
them into a nightmare instead of a realization of the public will."

Analysts and observers say that many well-placed politicians, police
officers and military officials already are profiting from the drug
trade. A high-ranking anti-narcotics official recalled discussing the
problem with a U.S. general, who "asked me if I could give him a list
of these officials who were involved. I told him it would be easier if
I listed officials who weren't involved. That would be a shorter list."

While opium poppy has been cultivated in Afghanistan since the 18th
century, the drug trade did not flourish here until recent decades,
according to a U.N. study published this year.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion spawned a decade-long guerrilla war
fought by U.S.-backed Islamic resistance forces, the Afghan government
lost control of the rugged hinterlands and never fully regained it.
Through the Soviet war and the years of conflict that followed, almost
every faction funded itself at least partly through the drug trade.

The seemingly endless fighting also destroyed Afghanistan's
agricultural infrastructure -- in particular the irrigation canals
essential for nurturing crops and the roads needed to get them to
market. Poor farmers increasingly turned to opium to support their
families. The opium poppy requires less water than wheat, and the
valuable sap it produces could be sold quickly to dealers in the
fields or kept indefinitely on a farmhouse shelf and used as barter
whenever a family needed something from the local bazaar.

In 1999, Afghanistan produced its largest opium crop to date: 5,060
tons, from about 224,000 acres of land, according to the U.N. Office
on Drugs and Crime. The following year, the Taliban, the radical
Islamic movement that ruled most of the country, banned cultivation of
the opium poppy, but not its trade. As a result, the price of opium
soared and the Taliban reportedly profited hugely from selling
stockpiles of the narcotic. Poppy cultivation plummeted, except in
Badakhshan province and other areas not under Taliban control.

After the U.S.-led military campaign in late 2001 toppled the Taliban,
the new president, Hamid Karzai, banned every aspect of the drug
trade. Governors in some traditional poppy-growing provinces
cooperated with aggressive eradication programs, but the poppy has
spread rapidly in many areas where it traditionally had not been grown.

As they do every year, U.N. surveyors are trying to quantify this
year's poppy harvest using satellite photography and field
inspections. Their findings will be announced in September, but some
surveyors say anecdotal evidence already points to an extraordinary
year.

In one corner of the Borek district in Badakhshan, for example, Said
Amir, a U.N. surveyor, said that "last year I could not find one poppy
there. This year it's on about 40 percent of the land."

There is broad agreement among anti-drug workers, aid agencies and
poppy farmers that efforts last year to stop cultivation by paying
farmers to eradicate their poppy fields only encouraged more to grow
it this year in the hope that they would be paid again. And because
aid groups have made food more plentiful, some farmers are feeding
their families donated wheat, leaving their fields free for planting
poppy.

In the northern province of Faryab, for example, World Food Progam
workers said they noticed the greatest poppy cultivation in areas
where they distributed wheat most heavily. In the remote Garziwan
district, accessible only by donkey or horse, villagers who used to
travel to pick up donated wheat told aid workers that they could not
be bothered. Newly flush with opium profits, they wanted the wheat
only if aid workers delivered it to them.

'Everybody Is Affected' In Badakhshan province, known for the tenacity
of its opposition to the Taliban and the beauty of its mountainous
terrain, the drug trade is exerting a gravitational pull on the local
economy and power structure.

The increase of poppy fields and drug labs has driven the price of a
day's labor from about $3 to $10 -- beyond the reach of farmers
tending low-priced legal crops, but affordable for poppy growers.

The rising labor costs have also stalled road and bridge projects and
other reconstruction efforts that are desperately needed in the
province, which is poor even by Afghan standards, said Mohammad Hakim,
30, political officer for the Badakhshan office of the U.N. mission in
Afghanistan.

"Almost all the U.N. projects have stopped because there is no labor,"
he said. "People are working with the poppy. Roof construction, school
projects -- all stopped. Everybody is affected."

Last year, Hakim said, several militia commanders scattered throughout
the province tried to halt the spread of poppy cultivation and
drug-processing labs. "This year, there was only one," he said. "Next
year, maybe none. In some districts, the commander is the owner of the
factory. The people who are getting involved are getting powerful."

Cmdr. Fazel Ahmad Nazari, head of criminal investigations for the
Badakhshan police, said: "Day by day, it's growing more organized. If
it keeps going like this we won't be able to combat it, ever."

As the drug trade spreads, law enforcement efforts to combat it remain
rudimentary.

The fledgling national government's new Counter-Narcotics Department
is still struggling to establish itself. Kabul-based anti-narcotics
police units are largely in the planning and training stage. No one is
seriously investigating official drug corruption. "We don't have the
capacity yet," said Mirwais Yasini, director general of the Counter
Narcotics Department.

In the eastern province of Logar, convoys of trucks loaded with drugs
and guarded by men armed with semi-automatic weapons and
rocket-propelled grenades travel toward the Pakistani border at least
two or three times a week. The police chief says that his men don't
have the firepower to stop them and that some well-armed militiamen
are in league with the smugglers.

"It's out of our control," said Maj. Gen. Noor Mohammad Pakteen, who
has been a law enforcement officer for 36 of his 59 years. "The drug
mafia is getting worse daily. When nobody will help us, we can't do
anything. . . . I'm so frustrated, actually, I'm ready to leave my
job."

Police across the country not only do not have the might to confront
well-armed drug smugglers, they also lack such basics as cars,
telephones and radios.

In mountainous Badakhshan, the police have just one vehicle, a pickup
truck. When police at headquarters in the provincial capital,
Faizabad, receive a tip about a smuggling operation in a far-flung
district, Nazari often has to send an officer on foot. A round trip
can take a month and leave an officer in trouble with no way to call
for help.

"These mafia who are very active in Afghanistan have everything,"
Nazari said. "They have motorbikes, pistols, mobile phones and tight
communication. The police who are trying to combat those smugglers
have nothing."

Police in Badakhshan are supposed to receive a monthly salary of up to
1,500 afghanis -- about $30. But the national government has failed to
pay them for months at a time.

A demoralized police officer is ripe for bribes. "For $100, he'll be
hired," Nazari said. "The drug smugglers will give him some money and
tell him that even though he knows about a laboratory he should say
that he doesn't. It's happened lots of times."

Few Condemnations The elder of Boymalasi village -- a doctor -- last
year criticized the spread of poppy fields throughout the Argo
district of Badakhshan. This year he's growing poppy.

"I feel 100 percent terrible about it," said Hasamudin, 44, looking
down at his feet. "There is no rule in Afghanistan. If there was rule,
the people could not do this. They would have to obey the orders of
the government. There is no government in Afghanistan, just the name
of government. Who will come and ask us about our crime?"

Ghulam Mohammad, 60, expressed no such misgivings. He has lived most
of his life in a one-room house in Argo, farming wheat on a small plot
to support his family of 10. "We never had a good life," he said.

This season he and his son-in-law Safar planted poppy. Mohammad
borrowed against anticipated profits of $1,800 -- 30 times more than
he ever earned selling wheat, he said -- to add three rooms to his
house.

Nobody, not even the local mullahs, is telling the wizened farmer and
his neighbors that what they are doing is wrong. In fact, they laugh
at the notion.

"In my village, the mullah himself has cultivated it," Safar, 45,
said.

"All the mullahs are cultivating it," Mohammad said.

Along the banks of the nearby Kokcha River, Mullah Abdul Rashid of the
Jata mosque is indeed laboring in his poppy field. Working with his
business partner -- Sarwar, the mosque's mawlawi -- the mullah deftly
slices one ovoid poppy pod after another to release opium sap. All 80
families in their village are growing poppy this year, the clerics
said.

"Of course we believe that growing this poppy will have a very bad
moral effect on the people of Badakhshan," the mullah, 36, said. "In
the future, we hope it will be eradicated. Now, it's everywhere
because the people need it to survive.

"I won't allow anyone to eradicate this field," the mullah said. "In
the future, if my situation got better, I'll destroy it myself."