THE OPIUM BRIDES OF AFGHANISTAN

In the Country's Poppy-Growing Provinces, Farmers Are Being Forced to
Sell Their Daughters to Pay Loans.

Khalida's father says she's 9-or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah
loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer
can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his
side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf.

They both know the family can't keep her much longer.

Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men
like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of
eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains.

It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even
so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but
poor farmers like him only subsist.

Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to
pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter," says Shah. The
family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local
trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at
harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government
crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in
Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of
poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to
Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province.

The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took
his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency.
Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to
reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage.

Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come
back for his prize.

Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become
impossible. "It's my fate," the child says.

Afghans disparagingly call them "loan brides"-daughters given in
marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice
began with the dowry a bridegroom's family traditionally pays to the
bride's father in tribal Pashtun society.

These days the amount ranges from $3,000 or so in poorer places like
Laghman and Nangarhar to $8,000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan's No.
1 opium-growing province.

For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation-but at a
cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on
the honor of the bride and her family.

It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently
told the nation: "I call on the people [not to] give their daughters
for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't
give them in forced marriages."

All the same, local farmers say a man can get killed for failing to
repay a loan. No one knows how many debt weddings take place in
Afghanistan, where 93 percent of the world's heroin and other opiates
originate.

But Afghans say the number of loan brides keeps rising as
poppy-eradication efforts push more farmers into default. "This will
be our darkest year since 2000," says Baz Mohammad, 65, a
white-bearded former opium farmer in Nangarhar. "Even more daughters
will be sold this year." The old man lives with the anguish of
selling his own 13-year-old daughter in 2000, after Taliban leader
Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy growing. "Lenders never show any
mercy," the old man says. Local farmers say more than one debtor has
been bound hand and foot, then locked into a small windowless room
with a smoldering fire, slowly choking to death.

While law enforcers predict yet another record opium harvest in
Afghanistan this spring, most farmers are struggling to survive.

An estimated 500,000 Afghan families support themselves by raising
poppies, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Last year
those growers received an estimated $1 billion for their crops-about
$2,000 per household. With at least six members in the average
family, opium growers' per capita income is roughly $300. The real
profits go to the traffickers, their Taliban allies and the crooked
officials who help them operate.

The country's well-oiled narcotics machine generates in excess of $4
billion a year from exports of processed opium and heroin-more than
half of Afghanistan's $7.5 billion GDP, according to the UNODC.

Efforts to promote other crops have failed.

Wheat or corn brings $250 an acre at best, while poppy growers can
expect 10 times that much. Besides, poppies are more dependable:
hardier than either wheat or corn and more tolerant of drought and
extreme heat and cold. And in a country with practically no
government-funded credit for small farmers, opium growers can easily
get advances on their crops.

The borrower merely agrees to repay the cash with so many kilos of
opium, at a price stipulated by the lender-often 40 percent or more
below market value.

Islam forbids charging interest on a loan, but moneylenders in poppy
country elude the ban by packaging the deal as a crop-futures
transaction-and never mind that the rate of return is tantamount to usury.

Opium is thriving in the south, particularly the provinces of Helmand
and Nimruz, where Taliban fighters keep government eradication teams
at bay. But times are perilously hard for farmers in other places
like Nangarhar, a longtime poppy-growing province on the mountainous
Pakistani border.

Mohammad Zahir Khan, a Nangarhar sharecropper in his late 40s,
borrowed $850 against last spring's harvest, promising 10 kilos of
opium to the lender-about $1,250 on the local market.

The cash bought food and other necessities for his family and allowed
him to get seed, fertilizer and help tending his three sharecropped acres.

In the spring he collected 45 kilos of raw opium paste, half of which
went immediately to the landowner.

But before Khan could repay the loan, his wife fell seriously ill
with a kidney ailment. She needed better medical care than Nangarhar
could offer, so he rushed her across the Pakistani border to a
private hospital in Peshawar. It cost almost every cent they had, and
Khan knew his opium debt would only grow. Worse, the provincial
governor, a former warlord named Gul Agha Sherzai, chose that moment
to declare his own war on drugs, jailing hundreds of local farmers
who were caught planting opium.

Nangarhar had 45,000 acres in poppies a year ago; today drug experts
say the province is totally clean.

Late last year Khan reluctantly gave his 16-year-old daughter, Gul
Ghoti, in marriage to the lender's 15-year-old son. Besides forgiving
Khan's debt, the creditor gave him a $1,500 cash dowry.

Khan calls him an honorable man. "Until the end of my life I will
feel shame because of what I did to my daughter," Khan says. "I still
can't look her in the eye." But at least she was old enough to marry,
he adds. He claims one local farmer recently had to promise the hand
of his 2-month-old daughter to free his family from an opium debt.
Khan is raising wheat this year. He doubts it will support his
family, and he worries that eventually one of his two younger
daughters will become a loan bride. Neither of them is yet in her teens.

Eradication efforts aren't the only thing pushing opium marriages.

Poppy acreage is expanding in Helmand province, but loan brides are
common there, too, says Bashir Ahmad Nadim, a local journalist. He
says moneylenders in Helmand are always looking for "opium flowers"-
marriageable daughters ready for plucking if crop failure or family
emergency forces a borrower into default.

In the south's drug-fueled economy, fathers of opium brides often get
hefty cash bonuses on top of having their debts forgiven.

But in Nangarhar, even former lenders are feeling the pinch.

Enaghul, 40, used to be a relatively prosperous poppy farmer.

Today he has little to show for his past wealth aside from his
17-year-old daughter-in-law, Shaukina, and a 2-month-old grandson.
"She is pretty and works hard in the fields," Enaghul says, still
happy to have won her for his son. Four years ago he gave Shaukina's
father a loan in return for a promise of 30 kilos of opium, never
imagining that both their fields would be eradicated before harvest.
That's how Enaghul's son married Shaukina. But with the opium ban,
Enaghul says his family is barely surviving.

They make less than $2 a day growing tomatoes and potatoes. Enaghul
casts an appraising eye on his youngest daughter, Sharifa, 5, as she
runs after a goat in the courtyard of their mud-and-brick home. "I
think she would fetch between $500 and $600," he says. With luck, he
says, he might be able to postpone the wedding five or six years.

Some Western officials promise the hard times won't last much longer.

Loren Stoddard, Afghanistan director for the U.S. Agency for
International Development, says crop-substitution programs are
already yielding results.

As many as 40,000 farming families in Nangarhar are receiving some
kind of compensation for the loss of opium revenues, he says, and
USAID has financed the planting of 1.3 million fruit, nut and other
trees in the province since 2006, with plans for an additional
300,000 this year. There's even a new mill producing 30 tons of
chicken feed a day. "Good things are happening here," Stoddard says.
"I think Nangarhar will take off in the next two years."

Many farmers doubt they can hold out that long. Kachkol Khan looks
around his single acre of wheat in Pa Khel village and asks how he
will feed his family of seven. "What we earn from this wheat won't
feed us for one month," he says. Six months ago he gave the hand of
his 13-year-old daughter, Bibi Gula, to settle an opium debt of $700,
with roughly $1,500 cash thrown in. That's what they're living on
now. At least his creditor agreed to let Gula stay home until she
turns 15. "I'm not happy with what I did," Khan says. "Every daughter
has ambitions to marry with dignity.

I fear she'll be treated as a second-class wife and as a maid." Even
worse is his worry that the same future may await his two younger
daughters, 11 and 10.

Angiza Afridi, 28, has spent much of the past year interviewing more
than 100 families about opium weddings in two of Nangarhar's 22 districts.

The schoolteacher and local TV reporter already had firsthand
knowledge of the tragedy.

Five years ago one of her younger aunts, then 16, was forced to marry
a 55-year-old man to pay off an older uncle's opium debt, and three
years ago an 8-year-old cousin was also given in marriage to make
good on a drug loan. "This practice of marrying daughters to cover
debts is becoming a bad habit," says Afridi.

Even so, the results of her survey shocked her. In the two districts
she studied, approximately half the new brides had been given in
marriage to repay opium debts.

The new brides included children as young as 5 years old; until
they're old enough to consummate their marriages, they mostly work as
household servants for their in-laws. "These poor girls have no
future," she says. The worst of it may be the suicides.

Afridi learned of one 15-year-old opium bride who poisoned herself on
her wedding day late last year and an 11-year-old who took a fatal
dose of opium around the same time. Her new in-laws were refusing to
let her visit her parents.

Gul Ghoti is on her first visit home since her wedding six months
ago. She says it's a relief to be back with her father and mother in
their two-room mud-and-brick house, if only temporarily. "My heart is
still with my parents, brothers and sisters," she says. "Only my body
is with my husband's family." She says she personally knows of two
opium brides who killed themselves. "One of the girls had been badly
beaten by her husband's brother, the other by her husband," she says.
Ghoti says she's considered suicide, too, but Islam stopped her. "I
pray that God doesn't give me a daughter if she ends up like me."