THE HOLY MEN OF HEROIN

Afghanistan Has Been Ruined By War. But It Does One Job Better Than
Anyplace Else In The World: Produce Opium.

Zuber has a gaze that's a little too steady. Taken together with his bushy
black beard, shaved head and tan shalwar kamiz -- the pajamalike clothes
that Afghan men wear -- the effect is unsettling. He looks like one of
those Afghans who's seen too much war. But Zuber's ghosts have a different
origin. Until a month ago the 30-year-old Afghan worked at an
opium-processing factory in Nangarhar province that every day produced up
to 220 pounds of morphine base -- the main ingredient in heroin. He says
the place was bubbling with steam from boiling vats of opium gum. "Whether
you like it or not, you're breathing it," says Zuber, who recently checked
into a rehabilitation clinic in Peshawar, Pakistan. "When you get home,
after the opium wears off, your legs and arms begin to ache, and so you
start eating or smoking opium to relieve the pain." The clinic Zuber now
calls home has 20 beds and a waiting list with 3,000 names. Some addicts
have scars on their heads where they once sliced open their scalps to rub
heroin into the wounds. They thought that was the most direct route to
their brains.

Afghanistan, wrecked by 20 years of war and now ruled by Islamic radicals,
has one perverse claim to success. Thanks to this year's bumper poppy crop,
the country has become the world's undisputed leader in the production of
opium. The United Nations estimates that Afghanistan accounted for an
astonishing three quarters of global output in 1999, eclipsing the Golden
Triangle region of Burma, Laos and Thailand. Afghan heroin is sold in
neighboring Pakistan, which has nearly 2 million addicts, and also in Iran,
Central Asia and Russia. As much as 90 percent of the heroin used in Europe
originates in Afghanistan. Although most of the heroin sold in the United
States comes from Colombia, American officials worry that increased
quantities of Afghan drugs will find their way here.

This presents policymakers in Washington and other capitals with a dilemma.
How do you combat drug production in a country that, even if you ignore the
heroin trade, already is treated like a pariah? The Islamic Taliban
militia, which administers roughly 85 percent of Afghanistan, claims that
it would like to cooperate with drug-eradication efforts, but it lacks
credibility. The government is recognized by only three countries:
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It practices what the
West calls "gender apartheid" by severely subjugating women, including
forbidding them from working and attending school. Its forces have
committed human-rights abuses against minorities, including roundups of
ethnic Hazaras, some of whom have disappeared. And it harbors Islamic
extremists like Osama bin Laden, the alleged ringleader behind the bombings
of two U.S. embassies in Africa last year that killed 224 people.

Intense diplomatic pressure on the Taliban hasn't had much impact. In July,
Washington banned all U.S. commerce with Afghanistan because of the
Taliban's refusal to turn over bin Laden. When that failed, the U.N.
Security Council two weeks ago ordered a freeze on overseas accounts of
Taliban leaders and imposed a ban on its airline. The Taliban remains
unyielding. "We will never hand over Osama bin Laden," scoffed Wakil Ahmad
Muttawakil, the Taliban's foreign minister, in response to the sanctions.
"He will remain free in defiance of America."

The Taliban can afford to be defiant, in part, because the opium trade
provides it with both income and political leverage. To bring the trade to
an end, Taliban mullahs argue, the United Nations should recognize the
Taliban as a legitimate government and help it find alternatives. In the
meantime, by allowing opium production, the Taliban improves economic
conditions in areas under its control, and attracts needed tax revenue to
prosecute the war against its rivals.

For the record, Taliban officials correctly argue that poppy cultivation
was part of the Afghan landscape long before the Taliban forced its rivals
out of Kabul in 1996. The regime has its own drug czar, it outlaws drug use
and it occasionally makes a show of destroying poppy fields or closing
labs. Most recently it ordered farmers to cut poppy cultivation by 30
percent. It also admits to imposing a 10 percent usher -- or religious tax
- -- on the poppy crop. But officials argue that poppies are not a drug, and
say the tax is no different from that charged on, say, wheat. Moreover,
they insist they cannot afford -- politically -- to crack down on farmers.
"We are against poppy cultivation, narcotics production and drugs," says
Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban representative in the United States. "But
we cannot fight our own people. They are the sole source of our authority."

That's only a half-truth. The fuller version is that the Taliban also earns
taxes directly not just from poppy farmers, but from heroin labs. Zuber,
the addict who now lives in a Peshawar rehabilitation clinic, says that his
lab packed morphine base into bundles that were taxed at about $55 per
kilogram (2.2 pounds) by the Taliban. The daily tax revenue at that lab
alone could amount to $5,500 in peak season -- and the facility was one of
20 or 25 in the vicinity. NEWSWEEK has also examined photographs of
official tax receipts from the heroin labs. "Criminal elements, religious
elements and official elements are all connected in the heroin trade like
rice and honey," says a law-enforcement agent for a Western government who
has done undercover work in Afghanistan.

Opium is traded at large bazaars in Afghanistan that are the treacherous
domain of criminal syndicates. One of the more notorious is located in the
town of Sangin, a three-hour drive west of the Taliban capital at Kandahar.
"Sangin is known as a dangerous place," says Bernard Frahi, head of the
U.N. drug-agency office in Islamabad, who visited the market town in
October. "It is known for people going in and not coming out." Of about 500
shopkeepers crowded along one main street and two or three footpaths off
it, he says, almost half sell opium. In front of their shops are scales,
and inside they keep wet opium in plastic bags and dry opium stacked in
large cakes. "One trader told me he sold 28,000 kilos [61,600 pounds] of
opium last year," says Frahi -- earning the merchant gross revenue of about
$132,000.

Even more dangerous than the opium markets are the border areas with Iran,
Tajikistan and Pakistan, where smugglers sometimes battle with border
guards. Iran is fighting what amounts to a war of attrition -- by Tehran's
count, drug traffickers have killed more than 2,650 Iranian security
personnel since 1983. In early November more than 30 Iranian guards were
killed in a single battle with a drug convoy.

Some suspect the Taliban of an ulterior motive in its drug policy:
poisoning "infidels." But Afghan drugs are harming at least as many Muslims
as non-Muslims. In Pakistan, addicts either shoot up or "chase the dragon"
by smoking opium, and Iran has a swelling population of more than 1 million
drug abusers. Although addiction is a problem in parts of Afghanistan, it's
not widespread, so opium farmers don't often see the human damage of their
trade. "Afghanistan is a poor, landlocked country," says Ghulam Hazrat, who
once worked as a high-school literature teacher, but now grows opium
poppies. "In these past 20 years, the land wasn't tilled right. Schools
didn't operate. The roads became bad. The only thing we have is opium."
Somewhere far down the road -- in Tehran or Paris or one of a thousand
other places -- Hazrat's gain will become another man's horror.