HUGE stockpiles of heroin and opium rumoured to be hidden in the mountains of
Afghanistan could be crucial economic targets in a military offensive against
this impoverished state.
Ravaged by years of war, Afghanistan has no modern factories,
telecommunications networks or banking systems worth hitting. But it dominates
the global heroin business. And while the country’s Taliban regime enforced a
ban on opium growing last year, it did not openly destroy any stocks and is now
set to allow growing to resume.
“They’re already contemplating going back to cultivation,” says Tadesse
Zerihun, an agricultural adviser to Oxfam who returned from Afghanistan last
week.
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Always substantial, the amount of opium grown in Afghanistan exploded after
the Taliban seized power in 1996. Fields rapidly filled with flowering opium
poppies and Taliban officials turned a blind eye to the new refineries that
churned out heroin—an even more valuable export than opium.
By 1999, according to the United Nations Drugs Control Programme, Afghanistan
was growing more than 4000 tonnes of opium a year, making it the root source of
three-quarters of the world’s illegal heroin and 90 per cent of Europe’s. Worth
billions of dollars annually, opium has provided the Taliban with a cash
lifeline, enabling them to stock up on four-wheel-drive vehicles and missiles
while the rest of the country goes hungry. Sooner or later, say narcotics
experts, the war on terrorism is going to have to involve a crackdown on the
opium trade in south-west Asia if it’s to succeed.
One controversial option already under consideration is to spray poppy fields
to kill the crops. In neighbouring Uzbekistan, the UN—largely with US
backing—has been funding trials of a fungus that kills the plant by
attacking its roots. In the present climate, though, the PR fallout from using
anything resembling a biological weapon would be severe, and in any case it
could be months before there are enough poppies growing again to make an attack
worthwhile.
Seeking out and destroying stockpiles of opium and heroin would make more
sense, say experts. But that won’t be easy.
Few doubt the stocks exist. “Obviously they would have stockpiled opium, as
an insurance policy and to use as a weapon to fight the West,” says Zerihun.
“The one who smokes and dies is the westerner, not the Afghan.” What’s more,
across Western Europe, heroin is as cheap and plentiful now as it was before the
Taliban’s ban on cultivation, suggesting trading has not been interrupted at
all. Earlier this year a UN expert panel on Afghanistan concluded that the
Taliban had only halted opium production to keep heroin prices high in the West
after several years of bumper opium crops.
In fact, the only dramatic effect of the ban has been on the people of
Afghanistan. In the main opium-growing region, some 200,000 labourers and
farmers have lost their income and face starvation, says Zerihun. Many have
already fled to the Herat refugee camp near the border with Iran.
Declining to comment on whether heroin stocks would be targeted, a
spokesperson for the US State Department said: “Although no stockpiles have been
located and the rumours of their existence have not been confirmed, it is
possible that the Taliban continues to profit from opium trafficking.”
So, too, do the Taliban’s Afghan opponents, the Northern Alliance. The US and
its allies will not want to stand in their way. Nor will they be keen to risk
shattering fragile relations with neighbouring Pakistan, another major opium
grower.
