Islamic rule failed to stem Afghan poppy crop

by Kenneth J. Cooper

Washington Post

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan After the Taliban militia took control of
Mghanistan's capital in Kabul last September, its leaders vowed to
establish the most Islamic state in the world. Two months latet; in the
planting season in southern Afghanistan's opiumpoppy fields, the
fundamentalist militia denounced the flowering crop used to produce
heroin as unIslamic.

But at the start of harvest time here in the Taliban's southern
stronghold, mature fields of white, pink and red poppies are in bloom.
They splash color even inside the wardamaged city of Kandahar, the
militia's headquarters, where one small plot flourishes across a dirt
road fiom the mudwalled central jail.

In the course of their nearly threeyearold fight to rule Afghanistan,
the Taliban's leaders have cracked down sometimes violently on the
people living in the twothirds of the country that has come under their
control. The Muslim clerics and their followers have punished harshly
women in dress deemed immodest, men with cleanshaven chins, adulterers,
thieves and sports players.

But they have shown no such resolve with producers of raw material for
intoxicants clearly forbidden in the Koran, Islam's holy book.

"There are no signs they have been doing anything," said Angus Geddes, a
United Nations official working to persuade Afghans to grow other
crops.

According to the State Department and the United Nations, Afghanistan
harvests at least 30 percent of the world's opium poppies. By the State
Department's reckoning, that makes Afghanistan the world's second,
largest producer of opium poppies.

The U.N. Drug Control Program, using different survey methods, estimates
that Afghanistan's output now rivals Burma's as the largest. More than 90
percent of Mghanistan's poppygrowing areas are under Taliban control.

The country's biggest poppy producirig province, Relmand, borders
Kandaliar Province to the east. Yet despite the Taliban's professed
religious convictions, it has not acted with customary zeal to stop poppy
cultivation.

Its reluctance stems from the damage Afghanistan's economy has suffered
during nearly two decades of war, the revenue derived from a 10 percent
tax collected on opium and a fear of losing popular support from hundreds
of thousands of small growers of poppiers.

"Everyone is growing poppy If we try to stop this immediately, the
people will be against us," said Abdul Raishid, drugcontrol director for
Kandahar Province.

Some Taliban leaders have suggested to U.N. officials that they would be
more inclined to enforce international antidrug agreements and ban
poppy cultivation if the U.N. and Western nations recognized their
fundamentalist regime, which no government has done. The hints amount
to a kind of narcodiplomacy seeking international legitimacy while
condonihg trafficking in illegal drugs.

"I've heard that argument: Once we get recognition, then we will
deliver all the good things," said Norbert Holl, a U.N. mediator
assigned to negotiate an end to the ongoing civil war between the Taliban
and an alliance of northern militias, including the former government of
President Burhanuddin Rabbani that the Taliban drove from Kabul last
year.

Raishid said the civil war was partly responsible for the continuing
poppy cultivation. "When we take control of the entire country, we will
stop it. In these days, we're too busy with the fighting," he said.

Rather than destroy easily identifiable poppy fields and risk popular
wrath, Rashid said, the Taliban has adopted the more difficult strategy
of intercepting drug shipments along Mghanistan's 1,500mile border with
Pakistan and 580mile border with Iran.

The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is particularly porous, with
many back roads winding through rugged terrain.

Afghanistan's poppy growers have ready buyers who take the opium harvest
to labs along the Pakistani border or inside Pakistan and Turkey, where
it is processed into heroin. Most Afghan heroin winds up in Europe,
routed through Turkey, Iran or Central Asia. Little reaches the United
States, according to U.N. surveys.

Afghans do not consume much opium or heroin, though hospital personnel
in Kandahar said they occasionally discover surgical patients are addicts
because they need massive doses of anesthesia. The Taliban has enforced a
ban on hashish, a milder drug used by s~diers on both sides of the civil
war.

For Afghan farmers, planting opium poppy on at least part of their land
represents a sensible choice in one of the world's poorer countries,
where smallscale farming and undisguised smuggling appear to be the
major economic activities. Opium poppy pays more and requires less water
than other crops. It also reaps cash advances from buyers to pay for
fertilizer and seeds.

"That is the reason we are growing this to make more money," said
Issa Khan as he shoveled mud to redirect the flow of irrigation water to
his blooming poppy fields. "Nobody has asked us to stop this."

Farmers have grown poppy alongside wheat, fruit trees and spices as
insurance against the failure of other crops that need more water, which
is scarce in many areas.

Because he earns twice as much from poppy as he does from wheat, Khan
said he planted 5 acres of poppy rnd 4 acres of wheat during the winter
growing season that is coming to an end. Wheat is the basic ingredient of
a flat, unleavened bread that is an Afghan staple.

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, the farmland seven miles west of
Kandahar citythat Khan and other poppy growers work was covered with
vineyards. Local farmers said they blame the Russians for the vineyards'
destruction during the decade4ong war against the former Soviet army.