Afghan Route to Prosperity: Grow Poppies

SHORABAK, Afghanistan -- Rahmatullah trudged toward his village with his
donkey, as men across Afghanistan have done for centuries. But in this
century, men in Jeeps and on motorbikes were passing him by.

So this year Mr. Rahmatullah, a 37-year-old father of three, speaking in
front of the village mosque and its mullah, said he would join his
neighbors in growing poppies to harvest Afghanistan's most lucrative cash
crop, opium.

His hierarchy of dreams is all sketched out. First he will pay off some
$1,200 in debt. Then he will build a house to replace the one room he
shares with his family, then buy cows for plowing.

"Then, if I get richer, I'll buy a car," he finished, eyes agleam.

Across Afghanistan, opium cultivation is surging, defying all efforts of
the Afghan government and international officials to stop it. Officials are
predicting that land under poppy cultivation will rise by 30 percent or
more this year, possibly yielding a record crop. Last year the country
produced almost 4,000 tons -- three-fourths of the world's opium -- in 28
of its 32 provinces. The trade generated $1 billion for farmers and $1.3
billion for traffickers, according to the United Nations, more than half of
Afghanistan's national income.

The expansion of the trade presents a gathering threat to the new
democratic government and a severe challenge to the American and
international forces here. But American officials, reluctant to open a new
front in the campaign against terror or engage in an antidrug war here, are
conflicted about how aggressively to combat it.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said in a recent interview that
with Afghanistan's elections approaching -- they are now scheduled for
September -- "the politics of it may require not to go too harsh" with
eradication.

But as opium production underpins ever more of Afghanistan's economic life,
from new business growth to home construction, officials also fear that the
economic and political risks of uprooting it will only increase. To the
chagrin of Afghan and international officials, the narcotics industry has
far outpaced the legal reconstruction of Afghanistan, with a capitalist
intensity they would otherwise applaud.

It has lured private capital for investment and created a free-market
system. With Thuraya satellite phones, farmers in distant Kandahar, a rival
source of poppy in the south, know almost in real time about changing
weather conditions here in this northeastern province, Badakshan, and
adjust prices accordingly.

Landowners and traffickers offer credit to farmers willing to grow poppy.
Trafficking has linked Afghanistan to the global economy. It even brought
the first real industry here, a heroin processing laboratory that villagers
estimated had operated for six months to a year before it was destroyed by
Afghan and British forces in January. One local referred to it as "the
company."

Afghanistan's opium production peaked under the Taliban, who partly
financed their movement from the profits. But in July 2000 the Taliban
banned opium cultivation, to the distress of many farmers, and the price
soared.

Many experts say the ban was simply meant to drive the price up, amounting
to an effective cornering of the market for the Taliban and others who had
amassed stockpiles.

British and Afghan officials are now counting on mullahs to spread the word
that it is haram, or forbidden, under Islam to cultivate opiates. But
interviews in many villages found that such preachings were ignored. Other
mullahs were growing it themselves.

For many Afghans, poppy has allowed for piety. A United Nations report on
Afghanistan's opium economy noted that 85 percent of opium traders surveyed
had performed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is incumbent on every
Muslim but too costly for most Afghans.

The growth in opium production is among the gravest threats facing the
administration of President Hamid Karzai. It has corrupted the government
from bottom to top, including governors and cabinet officials, according to
senior Afghan and American officials.

American and Afghan officials say opium is financing regional warlords like
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, local militias, the Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda.

Even as some American officials remain wary of fighting the spread of opium
too aggressively, others have criticized the British, who have taken the
lead against the drug trade here, for being too soft and slow on
eradicating poppy crops. A British plan in 2002 to compensate farmers for
eradication is widely seen to have acted as a "perverse incentive" to grow,
as one official put it.

Citing the link between narcotics and terrorism, United Nations and British
officials, meanwhile, are urging the American-led military alliance to take
on laboratories and traffickers. The Americans, who will put $73 million
toward antidrug operations in Afghanistan this year, say such an approach
will simply send the laboratories over the border to places like Pakistan's
tribal areas, while doing nothing to stop the surge in new cultivation.

But an American official also pointed out that many of those in the drug
trade "are the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001" from the
Taliban and on whom the American military continues to rely in its hunt for
the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

"The military just does not want to go down that road," he said.

Ideally, officials say, eradication efforts would focus on wealthy
landowners growing poppy, not poor farmers. But many struggling farmers
have become sharecroppers on the vast fields of the rich and would share
the punishment, just as they share the profit.

The American forces have so far limited their intervention against
traffickers and laboratories to encounters as they come across them in the
course of other military action.

But Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of the American-led forces, said in
March that his troops were finding growing connections between extremism
and drugs, which could augur a more assertive approach to the drug trade.

Afghan commando units, with British support, have recently raided as many
as 30 laboratories in Nangarhar Province, often meeting well-armed
resistance. An American A-10 attack plane shelled "the company" -- the
processing laboratory near here -- when the British and Afghan commandos
raided that site.

As the effort to treat the laboratories as targets increases, officials
expect violence to rise. American officials say raids on laboratories have
already provoked conflict among drug traffickers convinced that their
competitors informed on them.

Recent fighting in the Argo district prompted the removal of the governor
and police chief after officials in Kabul, the capital, concluded that the
two men were working for rival traffickers.

The opium trade is transforming life in Argo, a remote district in
Badakshan where a cover of green poppies climbs up steep, desolate hills.
The street that runs through the bazaar is mud, but the $200 television
sets in the stalls glitter.

In the last four years, said Abdul Rahman, 18, poppy provided his family
with a motorbike, a television, an electric generator, a VCR and a CD
player -- and a new house to hold it all. Last year his family accumulated
$4,000 in poppy profits.

Badakshan, here in the north, lays bare narcotics' distorting economic
effects. Poppy cultivation has driven up dowry prices and raised the cost
of labor so much that wheat was not harvested last year.

So many people are building new homes and businesses with their poppy
profits that Atiqullah, 23, a mason, said his daily rate had doubled.

Criminal calculation is partly driving the spread of the drug trade.
Residents of Pashtun-inhabited regions long known for poppy growing have
turned into outlaw Johnny Appleseeds, crossing the country with loans,
expertise and seedpods to generate more opium for heroin laboratories,
American and United Nations officials and Afghan farmers say.

But a calculus of human longing is also at work. With the price of opium
stubbornly stuck at more than $135 a pound, no legal crop can compete.

"We see in Daryan" -- a district thick with poppy -- "other people getting
rich," said Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses one name. "Their life
is better. We want to make our life better too."

Today, growing poppies is less about survival -- as it was during a drought
in this country -- than about upward mobility. It is about a new consumer
class and an even larger class of aspirants to it.

"Those who had a donkey have a motorbike," said Ahmed Shah, a young farmer
in Badakshan. "Those who had a motorbike have a car. Those who have one
wife want a second one."

In Dari, the local language, there is a saying: if your donkey lags behind,
cut his ear off. It reflects, Afghans say, the central role of envy in
their culture -- and in cultivation.

The Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, is full of first-time growers, many
of them mujahedeen soldiers. A young commander, Mayel, denied that he was
growing poppy, then whispered in earshot of a translator that he was too
ashamed to admit that he was.

"We see the people in the south and east getting rich," he told a confidant
with righteous logic. "Why shouldn't we cultivate too?"