WASTED: THE DROUGHT THAT DRUGS MADE

Afghanistan's Villages Are Drying Out-Because Hash Farmers Need The Water

Ask the villagers of Dalicharbolak how bad things are in the desert and
they show you a boy named Saifudden. He is five, but looks two. He is too
weak to walk, crawl or do anything but loll in his bearer's arms. He is
bald, and his arms and legs are like sticks.

Mohammed Akbar, 48, says Saifudden is an orphan. "Well, soon anyway." Akbar
explains that Saifudden's father fled this ravaged village three months ago
because of the drought and that his mother is dying fast. Ask about food
and the villagers say that, born in the year the rains first failed,
Saifudden has never tasted fruit, vegetables or meat. Ask about water and
their anger boils over. "They're killing us here," says Akbar, pointing
over the horizon to the lush plains upstream. "They're taking all the water.

I haven't seen water in our ditches for four years.

And all for chaars."

Chaars is charas-hashish, pressed cannabis resin.

Production is booming here in Afghanistan, aggravating a famine brought on
by years of drought and war. A healthy field of hemp needs plenty of water.
Dope growers in the mountains siphon off the streams that still flow, while
hash farmers in the plains dig wells up to 100 meters deep to reach the
water table.

The combined effect of drought, reduced water from the hills and the
cannabis cultivators' new boreholes is catastrophic, says Bertrand
Brequeville of French aid group Action Contre la Faim. "It's only the rich
drug producers who can afford the pumps to irrigate the land. They pump all
day, and all the wells in the villages around them dry up."

Driving west from Mazar-i-Sharif, northern Afghanistan's main city, you
catch the smell almost immediately. Baking in the midday sun, marijuana
bushes the size of a man give off the same dank stench that permeates hip
parties from New York City to New South Wales. For the decade before the
Soviet army invaded in 1979, the teahouses of Afghanistan were the toking
tourist's hangout of choice.

And even during 23 years of war, when the Afghans fought the Soviets and
then one another, the hash trade thrived. "Afghan black" remained a staple
sale for cannabis dealers across the world.

Mazar-i-Sharif gave its name to a particularly potent variety.

And last year, in the final weeks of the Taliban, Amsterdam's coffee-shop
owners even boasted they were doing their bit for the war on terror by
buying blocks stamped with a golden Northern Alliance stencil reading
"Freedom for Afghanistan."

Now, as Afghanistan emerges from war, dope farming has never been so
good-and the drought never so bad. The Taliban banned hash production, but
in the postwar chaos of lawless fiefdoms that dot the land, growers and
traders across the country are finding themselves free once again to
cultivate and export hashish without fear, and often with warlord
protection. Moreover, the international perception that cannabis is a
relatively benign drug-prompting some authorities across Europe and
Australia to decriminalize its use-has persuaded drug-policing agencies to
largely ignore it. So, while opium cultivation is monitored to the acre,
neither Interpol, the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention nor
the U.S.'s Drug Enforcement Agency can offer even rough estimates for how
much hashish Afghanistan produces or what the trade is worth.

But around Mazar it's almost impossible to find a field where hemp is not
being grown, either openly or poorly hidden behind watermelons or knee-high
cotton plants. "Everybody's farming chaars now," says former Taliban
fighter Faizullah, 27, watering a verdant six-hectare oasis of hemp
surrounded by desert.

Cannabis used to be outlawed by the Taliban. "But now," says Faizullah,
"it's a free-for-all."

Once grown and pressed, Afghan hash is sold to freelance truck and jeep
drivers who take it to Tajikistan or Kabul, where it is resold at four
times the price.

It's then smuggled via Central Asia or Pakistan to the West, where Afghan
hash finds many eager buyers.

But as dope smokers celebrate the new "enlightened" view of pot, any
thought of the distant, parched land where it is grown has been lost in the
haze. Back in the dust-bowl fields around Mazar, the growing foreign demand
and new freedom to exploit it translate into a rare chance at riches.

While prices are minimal compared with the eventual $3,000 to $8,000 a kilo
that Afghan hash fetches in the West, Northern Alliance commander Akbar
Khan says farming anything except cannabis makes little sense. "A kilo of
wheat sells for 20,000 Afghanis (40¢)," he explains. "But a kilo of chaars
will sell for 10 million ($200)."

The choice to grow drugs may be financially astute, but the effect on water
supplies is disastrous. There hasn't been significant rain in most of
Afghanistan for five years.

Action Contre la Faim says even in Kabul only 30% of residents have
sufficient water, defined as 15 liters a day for washing, cooking, farming
and drinking and less than 250 people per water access point.

That figure drops to 10% in large swaths of the north and even zero across
the south.

With dope growers exacerbating the shortage, centuries-old water holes and
underground courses have evaporated. Crops downstream of hemp fields have
withered and failed.

With nothing to eat or drink and plagued by choking dust, entire villages
and towns have emptied. "Whole parts of the country are turning into
desert," says Brequeville. "And that's irreversible-there's no way back
from the desert."

Tensions over water have even led to murder.

Last month, in a village called Shakhshirale close to the Turkmenian
border, hash farmers shot dead a man who walked all day to demand two
buckets of water.

And in Saifudden's village of Dalicharbolak, the men there admit that after
12 people died of malnutrition over the summer, some among them gunned down
two cannabis growers who were hoarding water upstream.

An hour's drive to the east of Dalicharbolak, a village headman says his is
the only settlement out of 38 nearby that has potable water-in effect, a
single half-meter-wide well must provide for 60,000 people. The headman
claims that anyone is welcome to use his well, but the guards fingering
AK-47s and a mounted heavy machine gun around the borehole suggest otherwise.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of what cannabis is doing to Afghanistan
is to be found at the village of Deh Naw, half an hour to the north of
Mazar along Afghanistan's main north-south highway.

Just out of sight of the hash hills upstream, the desert is swallowing Deh
Naw whole.

Five-meter-high sand dunes have crashed over the village's mud walls like
desiccated tidal waves, burying houses, blocking streets and suffocating
the vines and the mulberry, fig and pomegranate trees that once blossomed
here. The 600 villagers survive by gathering desert thornbushes-used for
lighting fires-and trading them for access to fetid water from a ditch half
a day's ride away by donkey. Abdul Shakur, 63, says every few weeks a huge
sandstorm traps him, his wife and their 11 children inside their hut for
days on end. Four months ago, the storm came at night and lasted four days;
Shakur and his neighbors dug out a family of five after a dune enveloped
their front door and all their windows.

"The storms are terrible," he says. "Even if you have something to eat, you
can't open your mouth or it just fills with sand. All you can do is hide
and sleep." Shakur has given up blaming anyone for Deh Naw's troubles.

He knows the landowners for whom he once worked the fields around Deh Naw
are the same people who now deprive that land of water for the sake of
greater profits in the hemp-rich hills.

But after 23 years watching a succession of conquerors-the Soviets, the
Taliban, and now the Northern Alliance and the Americans-come and go, he
has learned to focus on survival. "I don't know about governments or armies
or landowners or chaars," he says. "All I know is sand, and all I dream of
is water."