CENTRAL ASIA'S HEROIN PROBLEM

From Afghan Farms Into The Tajik Mountains, The Drug Trade Cuts A Wide Swath

In Khujand, Tajikistan, when someone shows up with a new Mercedes or Audi
or Jaguar, the joke on the street is that people don't ask how much money
it cost. They ask how many kilos it cost.

As the drug trade has saturated Afghanistan over the past decade,
trafficking routes have been carved through the brittle landscape of the
Central Asian nations to the north, like Tajikistan. Increases in crime,
corruption and addiction have followed, while repressive governments have
used the fight against narcotics as another tool to crush political opponents.

One tour of the heroin route can begin in northern Afghanistan, where
organized religious fanatics produce the drugs, and continue north through
Tajikistan, where organized criminals of a more familiar stripe take over.
A good place to start the tour is the city of Taloqan, where the elegant
tree-lined boulevards and the bustling bazaar belie its role as a fiercely
contested strategic point in the north.

According to one United Nations diplomat, about two tons of heroin flow
through Taloqan each month.

The city was a prize taken by the Taliban from the Northern Alliance in
2000, and then, this past November, it was recaptured by the Northern
Alliance in its US-backed blitzkrieg through the country.

Nearby, UN experts say, there is a group of warehouses with enough
stockpiled heroin to export a hundred tons a year for the next three years.

According to a Western diplomat familiar with the drug trade, when Taloqan
fell this past fall the owners of the heroin warehouses reached a new
accommodation with the incoming conquerors, switching sides even before the
door had swung shut behind the exiting Taliban. The warehouses "are not
destroyed, they are just waiting."

In Afghanistan, poverty has made drug production necessary for survival,
and warlords have used it to consolidate their power.

Virtually the entire economy is black market, aside from aid money.

The legal exports are worth approximately $ 80 million, according to the
CIA's World Fact Book: mostly carpets, dried fruit, nuts. The opium crop,
at rock-bottom prices in Afghan markets, is worth at least $ 120 million,
based on UN estimates of $ 30 a kilogram in February 2000. Since then, the
wholesale price has jumped tenfold.

The true value of the exported drugs, once they hit the streets in Moscow,
Amsterdam, Geneva, London or New York, is estimated at up to $ 100 billion.

Unlike in Colombia, Afghanistan's drugs aren't grown high in tree-covered
hills; instead, the poppy is cultivated more overtly in the only really
fertile areas the country has: the bottom land along rivers, in Badakshan,
Nangarhar, Kandahar, Oruzgan. Then it's processed near the cities.

Afghan heroin production is highly professional; the one-kilo plastic bags
are stamped with the names of the factories where they are produced.

One that I saw in November was stamped "999"; underneath, it said "95%.
Azad private factory--The Best of All Export, Super White." "Abdur Rauf"
read another, "wholesale," "Faizabad," meaning that's the city of origin.

Faizabad has always been under the command of the Northern Alliance.

Afghanistan produces three-quarters of the world's opium and
heroin--hundreds of tons a year. As a result, America's allies in the
current global conflict, as well as its enemies, are neck-deep in the
narcotics business.

As the postwar gamesmanship shifts into high gear, a US official preparing
for negotiations tells The Nation, "We're going to be dealing with people
at all sorts of levels who've had involvement with the opium trade."

And that's been the flavor of the confusing war on both terror and drugs in
the region.

Less than a year before the Taliban's designation as the enemy in the wake
of September 11, Afghanistan's brutal rulers won accolades from the West
for a ban on poppy cultivation. Last May the United States announced a $ 43
million aid package widely seen as a reward.

The ban was successful--because of the Taliban's implacable violence and a
drought--but cynical, shoring up the price while allowing traffickers to
unload huge stockpiles they'd built up.

In January Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai announced a new ban on drugs,
hardly a surprise as he shakes international trees for aid, but unrealistic
in an Afghanistan that is nearly ungovernable and desperate for cash. The
problem was that under the green thumbs of America's allies, large-scale
planting had already begun when the Taliban fell. In some villages, as much
as 70 percent of the acreage was sown with opium poppy instead of wheat.

President Bush acknowledged in late February that the country had failed to
stem drug production, but exempted the country from the cutoff in aid that
ordinarily follows such a finding.

From Taloqan and cities like it, the smuggling route heads north along the
dusty steppes, with opium and processed heroin in armed convoys passing the
streams of refugees, toward the infinite informal crossing points on the
900-mile border with Tajikistan. There is the Pyanj River, where fishermen
use grenades to kill carp, and beyond that the no man's land that ends with
a double chain-link fence.

Across the border, the small Tajik town of Moskovsky has become one of the
major transit points these days. It is separated from Afghanistan by a
kilometer or so of flat, landmined terrain, guarded by underpaid Russian
troops.

Even after the USSR's implosion, the Russians' 201st Motorized Division
stayed to protect this unlikely border, marking the territory it considers
vital as a buffer.

The Russians have frequent skirmishes with armed smugglers.

On October 12 a group of smugglers tried to sneak across with about
forty-two kilos of heroin.

They were intercepted, and in the fighting, a Russian soldier and a
smuggler were killed.

Two weeks later there was yet another battle.

This time the smugglers fled back to Afghanistan, abandoning about
eighty-one kilos.

On the northern side of the Pyanj riverbank, men in leather coats,
square-tipped shoes and fancy cars take over from the turbaned, bearded
Afghans. They arrange for the heroin to be repacked, hidden in cars,
trucks, or on mules, or smuggled by impoverished peasants.

North along this two-lane road in Tajikistan is Farhar. Last fall, Davlat
Ivganovich, a local driver, who used to make about $ 1.80 a day, couldn't
find work for five months.

This father of five ran into a friend, a heroin trafficker, on the street
one day near his house. "I said I needed money, that was my only way out."
His friend said, "Twenty dollars." He was to head up north to Khujand
carrying a half-kilo packet of heroin in a bag with a flowery design.

At a prearranged spot, a man would recognize him by the bag and would
collect the heroin.

Davlat agreed at once. "Of course I knew it was illegal, but I had to do
this in order to live."

He was caught on the way. When I met him he was brought out of an unlit
holding cell, a short man, disheveled and nervous. "I think my children
will probably become beggars," he said, showing no emotion.

He's probably right, and they are not alone.

The levels of poverty here are obscene even by the standards of the former
Soviet Union. The average monthly income is less than $ 10.

Tajikistan is still recovering from its civil war, which began as if on cue
in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It claimed the
lives of an estimated 60,000 people, and in a nation with a population of
only 6 million, that means blood was literally splattering the countryside.
In 1997 a fragile peace agreement resulted in a coalition government. The
clannish makeup of this society meant that groups of warlords, once the war
was done, could easily transfer their energies to smuggling. "There were
structures on both sides, big shots on all sides, who were already
organized," says one UN official. "That's why organized crime developed so
quickly." It is a smuggler's dream, with an unstable, corrupt and weak
government; mountainous, sparsely inhabited terrain; and borders impossible
to police.

The rise in smuggling has made the authorities' heads spin. Five years ago
heroin was virtually unknown in the country.

Last year, authorities reported they'd seized almost four tons of the stuff
as of November.

The drive that Davlat Ivganovich took, hugging his half-kilo of heroin in
the flowery bag, follows a winding road through stunning, merciless mountains.

The path is lined by checkpoints manned by Tajik security officials.

Usually they want a small bribe, a dollar or so, to let the cars go on
their way. It is a truism that the cars that most obviously belong to drug
dealers, the snazzy, incongruous Mercedes, or even Jaguars, are the ones
that are not stopped and searched; the officers have to assume that someone
who can afford a car like that is too powerful to hassle.

The road climbs past a beautiful lake in territory controlled by a warlord
who is, according to some officials, allied with the leader of one of the
most feared terrorist groups in that part of the world, the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been closely linked with Osama bin
Laden's Al Qaeda network.

The group has launched armed incursions into Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and
Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley over the past few years.

The attacks, some officials speculate, were intended to help solidify new
drug-trafficking routes.

In Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe, Gen. Rustam Nazarov, the head of the
nation's Drug Control Agency, sees his country's problems as a direct
result of the troubles in Afghanistan. Asked about the difference between
the sides in the conflict there, he waves his hand dismissively. The
prospect of the Northern Alliance cracking down on the drug trade in a
grateful token of appreciation for US aid in its victory is unlikely,
Nazarov believes.

The drug trade finances the Northern Alliance just as it did the Taliban.
To give it up would be to give up their income.

A compact man with a five o'clock shadow at 10 in the morning, he quietly
sums it up: "One part of the Afghan population fights.

The other side produces drugs."

So far, international efforts to combat the Central Asian heroin trade have
been troubled.

Nazarov's agency, funded by the UN, has a massive budget by local standards.

The idea is simple: Pay police officers more to cut down on graft.

The UN Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCCP) pays its
officers about $ 200 a month, a livable wage (other police officers get
around $ 15 a month). UN diplomats say the agency's massive seizures are
proof that it is working.

Even so, there are lingering allegations of corruption and a concern that
the agency may just be rewarding a system of graft by paying high salaries
to those involved.

As Central Asia blossomed into one of the world's most significant drug and
crime bazaars, America was barely watching, following a relatively
hands-off policy in contrast to its concern with other drug-producing areas.

Because of precarious security in Tajikistan, the United States has not had
an embassy there since 1998. Nazarov flew to the United States himself to
plead with the Drug Enforcement Administration for aid, and he says he left
empty-handed. "The United States has been ignoring this region until the
events of New York," he says quietly. "Until then there was an impression
that Afghanistan doesn't exist for the Western world."

The region has received some antinarcotics aid through the State
Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs--about $ 11 million over three years--and from the UN, which is
spending $ 16 million on various programs.

But aid here can be more like a cluster bomb than a surgical strike, with
unintended consequences. In a recent report for the Open Society Institute,
chief author Nancy Lubin asks "whether the training and equipment provided
by the United States and others to Central Asia has actually been used to
fight drug trafficking, or to crack down on domestic political opposition,"
or to assist government officials and others to more effectively traffic drugs.

Matilda Bogner of Human Rights Watch in Uzbekistan, where religious
opposition figures are tortured, maimed, imprisoned and executed, agrees.
"Police officers will plant either a small amount of narcotics or they will
plant a few bullets on someone they want to arrest." Now the DEA plans to
send two agents to Tashkent, where they will be confronted with such
policing tactics and may have to distinguish legitimate drug investigations
from thinly veiled repression.

It is the suddenness with which heroin has penetrated this region that has
shaken it so much. Antonella Deledda, the graceful Italian diplomat who
heads the UN's antidrug efforts in the area, points out a startling change
in the traditional fabric of life in the region--the rising role of women
in the drug trade.

According to one report, 30 percent of the "mules" handling narcotics in
Kyrgyzstan are women, and the figure in Tajikistan may be even higher.

For many of Tajikistan's women, their journey down the heroin route ends
over the passes of the Fan Mountains north of Khujand. In the badlands
there, a dirt road leads past some sheep grazing on clumps of weeds, toward
the only women's prison in Tajikistan. One woman shuffles near the gate,
wearing a filthy chakan and slippers, and carrying a little bowl of food.
There are almost 300 women here behind the dirty white walls topped with
barbed wire. More than half of them are imprisoned on drug charges.

They are arrested as they work their way to Russia by train or by plane, at
border checkpoints or in sweeps.

Peasant women have taped drug packages under their breasts, inserted them
inside their vaginas or anuses, or swallowed them. One press account
reports that a woman flying to Moscow from Dushanbe had swallowed more than
seven kilos of the stuff: In terms of volume, that's bigger than a
basketball--it's probably closer to a beach ball.

Colombia, where women have been mules for decades, might offer some lessons
for this latest war in a number of ways. Until the current campaign against
terror, Colombia was America's biggest military engagement, a war viewed by
successive administrations solely though the prism of the drug trade, where
the United States continues, to no evident effect, its fight by proxy
against "narcoterrorists." The real terrorists operating out of Afghanistan
made that vague term seem even more inaccurate. With the fall of the
Taliban, there may be opportunities during the reconstruction to wean the
economy off narcotics, but so far, victory has meant propping up a
coalition of warlords, many of whom are linked to the drug business.

In early February the DEA sent a contingent of agents to Afghanistan as
well. They have their work cut out for them. The UN estimates that the crop
planted under the friendly new Afghanistan may yield up to 2,700 metric
tons of opium.

It will be ready for harvest in the spring.

Aram Roston, a writer in New York, has worked as a CNN correspondent, a New
York City police reporter and an investigative producer at ABC News.
Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.