WAR AND DRUGS - ANOTHER POWDER TRAIL

Graz, Kabul and Tehran

The Taliban have another weapon: control of most of the world's heroin.

On September 10th, the day before the terrorist onslaught on New York,
fresh opium was selling in the markets of Afghanistan for as much as $700 a
kilo, the highest level for almost a decade. Two weeks later, prices on the
streets of Jalalabad or Kandahar had tumbled as low as $100 a kilo. Since
Afghan opium accounts for about 70% of the world's heroin production,
western countries now fear that, besides all the other problems stemming
from that benighted place, they could soon face a flood of cheap Afghan heroin.

In the 1990s, when other forms of farming fell victim to an endless round
of internecine wars, Afghanistan greatly increased its cultivation of
opium. In 1989, the country produced nearly 1,200 tonnes. A decade later,
the harvest had almost quadrupled to an estimated 4,600 tonnes. But by June
2000, in a bid for respectability, the Taliban had started to work with the
United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP), and
banned the growing of opium. The ban slashed this year's harvest to a mere
185 tonnes, the lowest level in living memory and a 95% drop on the
previous year. All that ended after September 11th, when the Taliban
abruptly stopped co-operating with the UN.

By now only a few weeks of the autumn sowing season are left, and the
American-led bombing campaign--particularly heavy around Kandahar, an
important opium-growing region--will have disrupted the business. The ban,
too, still remains officially in force. So it is hard to predict how big
next spring's crop will be. But there are signs that the Afghan government
is releasing on to the international market some of the vast stockpile of
opium which has been built up during a series of bumper harvests. UN
officials believe that 2,800 tonnes of opium, convertible into 280 tonnes
of heroin, is in the hands of the Taliban, the al-Qaeda network of militant
Islamists, and other Afghan and Pakistani drug lords.

On the wholesale market in Pakistan, this deadly harvest could be worth
$1.4 billion. On the streets of London and Milan, processed into white
powder, its ultimate value is estimated by Interpol and UN officials at
between $40 billion and $80 billion. To put these figures in context, the
retail turnover of the European heroin trade is estimated at $20 billion a
year. UN officials say the current Afghan stockpile is enough to keep every
addict in Europe supplied for three years. It is also enough to allow the
Taliban and their allies to dominate the European, Russian and much of the
Asian market for another two years, if they can retain control of the
stockpile.

The Taliban probably have several motives for releasing the stockpile now.
Possibly they are selling off opium to buy weapons, or to build up their
supply of hard currency. They may also want to compound the social problems
of the western governments which are now their enemies. Whatever the
motive, the risk for Europe is awful to contemplate.

War has boosted Afghanistan's position as the world's main supplier of heroin.

Afghanistan's position as the world's main supplier of heroin has been
reinforced by 20 years of almost continuous war. It is a country with very
little arable land; only 2.6m of its 65m hectares (250,000 square miles)
are cultivated. In 1979, when the Soviet Union sent in its army, nearly 85%
of the population was dependent on the rural economy. But the anti-Soviet
struggle, followed by civil strife, had a disastrous effect on agriculture.
A third of the country's farms were abandoned, two-thirds of its villages
were bombed, and much of the rural workforce was forced by poverty,
dislocation and drought to seek refuge outside the country or in cities
such as Kabul and Kandahar.

As the old subsistence economy gave way to a monetised one, opium emerged
as one of the few commodities that could quickly be converted into American
dollars--which could, in turn, be used to buy arms. Afghanistan's plunge
into war also coincided with a drop in production in three other important
opium-growing countries. Turkey, Iran and Pakistan all started enforcing
strict drug-control laws and bans on opium-growing. This meant that just as
opium production was rising in Afghanistan, external factors allowed the
country to grab a bigger share of the world market.

For the first few years after they took power in 1996, the Taliban had no
compunction about encouraging the planting of opium. Like most food crops,
however, opium can grow only on land that is properly irrigated or fed by
rain. According to UN officials, the current food shortage partly reflects
a conscious decision by the regime to promote the cultivation of opium
rather than wheat.

The New Silk Road

How does Afghan heroin reach western markets? Broadly speaking, there are
two routes: one passing through Central Asia and Russia, the other through
the Balkans.

Well before it reaches Western Europe--in Afghanistan itself, or else in
Pakistan, Turkey or former Soviet states--the opium is converted into
morphine and then into heroin. The "precursor" chemicals required for this
process, such as acetic anhydride, are often diverted illegally from
factories in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. In the ramshackle new states which
until recently formed the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, drug lords
can rely both on lax laws and on the corruptibility of police and customs
officers, whose wages are a pittance compared with the sums at stake in the
narcotics business.

From these states, the lethal consignments--hidden in truckloads of
raisins or walnuts, disguised as bags of flour, or else transported in
rusting Soviet-era railway cars--take two different routes. The northern
route follows the old Silk Road into Russia, the Baltic States, Poland,
Ukraine and the Czech Republic. From there, it runs through Scandinavia,
Germany and points farther west. The UNODCCP'S director, Pino Arlacchi,
says that Russia's "new rich" are among the biggest potential growth
markets for heroin-pushers.

Several other ex-Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Belarus and
Lithuania, with good road and rail routes, have been described in American
government reports as increasingly important conduits for heroin from
Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the German authorities have been struggling to
staunch the flow of drugs through Poland. In 1999, for example, 80% of all
heroin stopped on Germany's borders was seized at the Polish frontier.

Police are particularly concerned by the arrival on the international
market of a strain of high-grade narcotic known as Heroin No. 4, or white
heroin, which is estimated to be at least 80% pure. Recent seizures in
Germany, Turkey, Finland and Poland have all proved to be white heroin
trans-shipped via Central Asia from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The southern, or "Balkan", route goes principally from Afghanistan to
Turkmenistan, across the Caspian Sea, into the Caucasus, then into Turkey,
from where the heroin is shipped to Albania and Italy. Other consignments
cross Bulgaria and Macedonia in container lorries, finding their way to
Serbia, Hungary and Austria. A second route goes through Albania, then
across the Adriatic in speed-boats on nocturnal dashes to beaches on the
eastern coast of Puglia, and then by motorway into Austria. A third route
involves container vessels sailing from Constantza, on the Black Sea, to
Turkey and on to Italy.

The one country that all drug traffickers try to avoid is Iran. Some 204
tonnes of opium and 29 tonnes of heroin and morphine were seized in Iran in
1999 by a combination of army battalions and police units deployed on the
country's eastern and northern borders, accounting for 85% and 50%
respectively of all seizures of opium and opium derivatives (heroin and
morphine) in the world. (In Turkey, by contrast, only one-third of a tonne
of opium was confiscated in the same year.) Hundreds of Iranian soldiers
and policemen have been killed in gun battles with traffickers.

Crime syndicates from Eastern Europe and the Balkans play a vital role.

As new routes are established to link the mountains north of Kandahar with
the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, a vital role is being played by crime
syndicates from Eastern Europe--Ukraine in particular--and the Balkans.
Throughout Western Europe, police report that whole sectors of criminal
activity are being taken over by ethnic-Albanian syndicates trading on
their success as drug-smugglers.

These fraternities, whose origins may be in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia or
in the long-established Albanian communities of southern Italy, have no
compunction about doing business with Serbian gangsters. They share with
them the proceeds from drug- and gun-running, as well as the traffic in
prostitutes from Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. According to police,
ethnic-Albanian drug-running families are almost impossible to infiltrate
because of the closeness of the family and clan structure and the
difficulty of the language.

In Prague, Albanians are fighting turf wars to oust Ukrainians controlling
the heroin trade, while in London Jamaican pimps--not known for their
respect for women's rights--complain of Albanian violence towards the East
European prostitutes they control. When police in Oslo made Norway's
largest-ever heroin seizure, they discovered that former fighters from the
Kosovo Liberation Army controlled the drug-distribution chain.
Heroin-dealing in Switzerland is dominated by Albanians. This year, much of
the money made went to buy arms for the rebels fighting in Macedonia and a
strip of southern Serbia.

At the faceless, glass-fronted building in Vienna where UN officials try to
keep tabs on this deadly traffic, more information seems to be available
about prices in the dusty street markets of the Indian sub-continent than
about dealings closer to home. But it is not hard to gather inklings, at
least, of the web of connections which now links the bombed-out war zones
of Afghanistan with ostensibly calm and prosperous places in Western Europe.

Less than an hour's drive from Vienna is the town of Graz, which serves as
a sort of nodal point for connections to the Balkans. This year's October
festival was a jolly, bucolic spectacle. But it was not difficult to spot,
among the brass bands and folk-dancing, the furtive figures of heroin
dealers from northern Albania, plying their trade with white-faced addicts.

Even these sad little transactions have consequences for places hundreds of
miles away, says a senior UN police officer who helped to seize two
truckloads of weapons--destined for the ethnic-Albanian rebels in
Macedonia--at the border between Montenegro and Kosovo this year. He
estimates that the anti-aircraft missiles, grenades and anti-tank rockets
he captured were part of an arms deal worth around $4m. At least some of
that was raised by selling, say, 20 kilos of heroin on the streets of
Austria or Switzerland.

UN officials hold out some hope that the heroin market will tighten again
once the Afghan stockpile disappears, especially if planting does not
resume. The United States and its allies will try to persuade any
post-Taliban regime to keep the ban in place. But in a wrecked country, in
desperate need of funds, the addiction to opium money will be hard to break.