Heroin boom in Afghanistan overwhelms border nations
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - Heroin producers in Afghanistan, some of the principal financiers of al-Qaida and other terrorists, have never before been so brazen or so wealthy.
With a bumper crop of opium poppies under cultivation, Afghan narco-barons have begun stamping their brand names on the 2.2-pound bags of heroin they smuggle out of Central Asia to buyers in Moscow, Amsterdam, London and New York.
Sacks of high-quality Afghan heroin seized last week in Tajikistan carried the trademarks "Super Power" and "555." Some of the sacks, which were hidden inside foil-lined containers of instant cappuccino mix, even included the addresses of the labs in Afghanistan where the heroin had been refined.
A Western-led campaign against opium-growing and heroin laboratories has been a wholesale failure, and drug-control experts say the number of processing facilities in Afghanistan has exploded over the last year. The trade and huge sums of money involved threaten to undermine vulnerable bordering states such as Tajikistan.
"There's absolutely no threat to the labs inside Afghanistan," said Maj. Avaz Yuldashov of the Tajikistan Drug Control Agency. "Our intelligence shows there are 400 labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated right along our border. Some of them even work outside, in the open air."
Some 200,000 acres of opium poppies have been planted in Afghanistan - opium serves as the raw material of heroin - and the country's late-summer harvest will produce three-fourths of the world's heroin. That will mean further billions for growers, smugglers, corrupt officials and Afghan warlords.
It's also likely to mean a windfall of tithes to al-Qaida and its Islamist brethren said to be regrouping in the mountains of Central Asia.
"Drug trafficking from Afghanistan is the main source of support for international terrorism now," Yuldashov said. "That's quite clear."
But in recent congressional testimony about heroin flow out of Afghanistan, Drug Enforcement Administration head Karen Tandy spoke only of "potential links" and "possible relationships" between Afghan traffickers and terrorists. Drug agents in Central Asia say they're baffled by Tandy's hedging.
"The connection is absolutely obvious to us," said Col. Alexander Kondratiyev, a senior Russian officer who has served with border guards in Tajikistan for nearly a decade. "Drugs, weapons, ammunition, terrorism, more drugs, more terrorism - it's a closed circle."
That circle has profound and ominous implications for the U.S.-led fight against international terrorism. Regional diplomats, aid workers and law-enforcement officials fear that the expanding drug trade will destabilize one of the "stans," the five former Soviet republics that gained independence after the U.S.S.R. collapsed.
They worry about the emergence of a Central Asian narco-state, a country dominated by the drug economy and effectively controlled by a heroin mafia with roots in Afghanistan and ties to al-Qaida and regional Islamists.
"We have a deep responsibility to keep these Central Asian republics from becoming failed states," said a Western diplomat in Dushanbe who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Look what happened in Afghanistan. It was a failed state - and it became a nest for terrorists.
"We have to stop that same thing from happening here. For our own security, we can't afford it."
At particular risk is Tajikistan, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim nation of 7 million.
Tajikistan produces almost no opium or heroin of its own, but it has become a natural pathway for traffickers due to its 900-mile border with Afghanistan. Also, enough heroin has been "falling off the trucks" in Tajikistan that it now has galloping rates of heroin addiction, drug crime and HIV infection.
The Tajik Drug Control Agency - outmanned, outgunned and poorly equipped - said it managed to seize nearly 6 tons of heroin from traffickers last year. Senior commanders estimate they catch about 20 percent of the traffic. Some analysts think it's probably about half that much.
Tajikistan, isolated and landlocked, has almost no industrial economy other than a state-controlled aluminum smelter. Foreign investment is minuscule; not a single American firm is operating in the country. "Nobody even comes to look anymore," said a foreign diplomat, who also asked not to be named.
The national budget is barely $300 million a year, a pittance compared with the size of the drug economy. The heroin trade alone, Yuldashov said, is 10 times bigger.
That kind of disparity leaves many Tajiks vulnerable to corruption and compromise by wealthy drug mafiosi, especially when the average salary is $10 a month and 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. A single trip as a drug courier can feed a Tajik family for a month.
Another worrisome development is in the offing for Tajikistan: Next month, along the Afghan border, Russia will begin withdrawing 2,200 border-control officers who've been stationed here since the Soviet era. Their departure and the loss of Russian funding could further undermine Tajikistan's ability to defend itself from Afghan drug traffickers.
Tajik officers and army conscripts will take over from the Russians, although they'll have no night-vision equipment, satellite phones or helicopters. Even now, many of the border posts lack two-way radios and binoculars.
It remains to be seen whether European countries, the target destinations for much of Afghanistan's opium and heroin, will pick up the slack. The United States contributes to U.N. drug programs in the region, but the DEA has only a minimal presence here in terms of human intelligence: The DEA has deployed two agents to cover all of Afghanistan. There are no DEA agents in Tajikistan or neighboring Kyrgyzstan, another paradise for traffickers.
"We know shockingly little about how the drug trade operates out here," said a Western official who asked not to be identified.
Heroin moves out of Afghanistan via the so-called southern route - through Iran or Pakistan - or the northern route, which makes its way through the Central Asian "stans."
It's unknown how much drug traffic passes through Turkmenistan. The secretive nation doesn't release information on drug seizures and no longer cooperates with regional drug-control initiatives.
"They have open borders with Afghanistan, but not even the U.N. knows what they're doing" about drug trafficking, said Kamol Dusmetov, the head of the Uzbek National Center for Drug Control.
Heroin is carried out of Afghanistan in vegetable trucks, fuel tankers and donkey carts. It's hidden in women's underwear, children's backpacks or sacks of pistachios.
In Tajikistan, well-organized teams of couriers wade across the Amu Daria and Pyanj rivers, usually at night, backed up by accomplices armed with satellite phones, off-road vehicles, bales of bribe money and plenty of heavy weapons. In one recent seizure, troopers found $280,000 in cash stuffed among the 1-kilogram bags of heroin.
In Uzbekistan, which has an 80-mile border with Afghanistan, smuggling can be more rudimentary.
Dusmetov said rural couriers sometimes forced their dogs and donkeys to swallow balloons full of heroin. They tie a string to the balloons and wrap the other end of the string around the animal's tooth. Once across the border, the smuggler pulls the string and retrieves the balloons.
"Borders (throughout the region) are not guarded well," Dusmetov said. "In many places, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, borders are virtually open. You jump across a ditch and you're in another country."
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