AN AFGHAN PROVINCE WHERE HEROIN RULES AND POLICE LOOK THE OTHER WAY

You can buy almost anything in Argu: sequinned dresses, cold
remedies, new machineguns and packets of heroin carefully wrapped in
white cotton and plastic and stamped with the legend "555 Afghanistan
best quality".

Argu is the biggest heroin-processing district in north-eastern
Afghanistan, home to at least 14 laboratories run by Pashtun traders
from the violent tribal borderlands near Pakistan, where the Taliban
are waging an insurgency against US troops which is fuelled by drug money.

The term laboratory makes the process sound sophisticated, but to
make morphine, little more is needed than a fire, an oil drum to heat
the opium and a bag of fertiliser to break it down. To turn that into
heroin, more oil drums, acetic anhydride and electric mixers are used.

Electricity must be provided by small generators because there are no
power lines in Argu, Badakhshan province, which shares borders with
Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. There are no paved roads and no
mobile phones either, but there is money, millions of dollars, very
little of which flows back into the community.

In spite of a raid on the bazaar last autumn by the country's
fledgling counter-narcotics police, when 700 tonnes of opium and
heroin were seized, business is booming again. The laboratories have
gone underground, operating at night and regularly moving locations.

The bazaar teems with traders on satellite phones, their fingers
black and sticky with opium, which is weighed out by shopkeepers at
the roadside.

The mud-filled roads are easier to navigate for the drug dealers, who
drive BMW and Lexus landcruisers, than for the local police in their
ancient Russian vehicles.

"What chance do you think we would stand in a car chase?" General
Shan Jahan Noori, the provincial police chief of Badakhshan, asks in
his office in the neighbouring town of Faizabad.

The drug smugglers can buy the latest technology and they can buy the
co-operation of local officials, says Gen Noori.

"The police here don't have a salary that can keep them in shoe
polish, so they see the smugglers with their pockets full of dollars
and they let them go.

"Forty to 50 per cent of the local police here are involved in the
drugs trade," he says.

Gen Noori earns almost $100 (82, 57) a month but some of his junior
officers make less than $10, which does not keep their families fed
in this remote mountainous region where transport costs have pushed
the price of food to almost double that in the capital Kabul.

As the winter snows melt, more of the drugs will flow north over the
border with Tajikistan.

Russia withdrew its border guards last summer, and the salaries of
the local Tajik guards dropped from $400 to $20 a month, making it
easier for drugs to move through the country and on into Russia and Europe.

Much of the heroin also still goes south to Helmand, from where the
Pashtun smuggling mafia hail. Almost 3,000 British troops will be
stationed there by May.

The dark-haired Pashtun smugglers with their flat-cap Pakol hats and
blankets worn like capes stand out in the Argu bazaar where the
locals are fairer Uzbeks and Tajiks. Four years since the fall of the
Taliban and about a decade since the Pashtun smugglers first appeared
in Afghanistan's remote Badakhshan, they still control the trade.

Azizullah Ahfizi, deputy commander of the provincial
counter-narcotics police, says they buy off the local police, and
protect each mobile laboratory with a dozen guards armed with
rocket-propelled grenades.

With corruption so rife, raids on drug laboratories usually fail or,
on one memorable occasion last autumn, end in a gunbattle between
smugglers and local police - the police stayed too long inside the
laboratory trying to divide the spoils among themselves, and the
smugglers returned with re-inforcements.

Mr Ahfizi's boss quit in disgust six months ago because he felt he
was fighting a losing battle.

"The government doesn't support us. I don't have guns, phones or
money but I have to stand up against the most powerful people in the
province. Why should I make such powerful enemies?" says Ghulam
Myuddin, former head of the counter-narcotics force, sitting with his
former colleagues in a storeroom full of the heroin and opium they
have seized. The 1,500 litres of acid and several tonnes of opium and
heroin represent a fraction of the narcotics that are churned out of
neighbouring factories every month.