The UN Giveth, And The Drug Trade Prospereth

Preston Peet - Special to High Times News
FILED 12/15/99

'There is no money that goes to anyone in Afghanistan from the UN.' --UN Drug Control Officer to HIGH TIMES

United Nations anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan have backfired, seemingly enabling the opium cartels there to more than double their poppy-crop yields this year to historic, unprecedented highs. Production of raw opium in Afghanistan shot up from 2,600 tons in 1998 to a record 4,600 tons last year, by the count of the UN's International Drug Control Program--which has incidentally been pumping millions of dollars into the Taliban, the pariah regime of Islamic fundamentalists that took over the country four years ago. Currently, the UN estimates that Afghanistan accounts for an incredible 75 percent of the entire global opium output, more than the fabelled Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand, and Laos

Last spring, 97 percent of opium-poppy cultivation took place in Taliban-controlled regions of the country. The drug-fighting UNDCP is virtually the only international agency that directly Aids the Taliban, who are internationally infamous for trampling on women's rights, and for harboring the US-hunted terrorist ringleader Osama bin Laden. Despite this, and uncontroverted evidence that the Taliban have long profited directly from taxing the burgeoning opium trade--and now even gather taxes on certain "white powders--UNDCP director Pino Arlacchi personally led a UN mission to Kabul in November of 1997 to set up subsidies for "drug control" programs there, and those subsidies persist to this day.

No UN Money To The Taliban? Well, MAYBE.
Funds for implementing the these narco-control efforts in Afghanistan are disbursed through the UNDCP'S office in Vienna, where spokesman Sandro Tucci guaranteed HIGH TIMES, right off the bat: "There is no money that goes to anyone in Afghanistan from the UN."

Then Tucci got into specifics: "There is a small pilot program in Afghanistan, at Kandahar. The money for this is given to the UN by major donors, and spent by the UN, to do the pilot program on the control of drug abuse."

Then Tucci got yet more specific, acknowledging that roughly $3 million had been spent in the year and a half that the program has been in existence. "This is the only region in Afghanistan where you see a decrease in the production of opium," he went on. "Decrease is very difficult to assess, but one datum which is for sure is that 400 hectares were eradicated by the Taliban in June of 1999. This has contributed to a general decrease in opium production in Afghanistan."

Boom Times For The Poppy Trade
Actually, according to the UNDCP's own ANNUAL OPIUM SURVEY, poppy cultivation increased a stunning 43 percent overall in Afghanistan last year, from 64,000 hectares in 1998 to 91,000 hectares for harvesting last spring--a hectare equalling about 2.5 acres. The number of opium-growing administrative districts (outside of Kandahar, where the Taliban's mullahs keep their religious government, and entertain official visitors like Pino Arlacchi) rose from 73 in '98 to 104 in '99. Altogether, two entire provinces, Jawzjan and Kunduz, began producing opium for the first time last year, raising the number of poppy provinces in Afghanistan to 18. Of all these provinces, 80 percent recorded sharp increases in poppy cultivation in '99, by the UNDCP's own count--led by Helmand Province in the south, long the major poppy-growing region of the country. The UNDCP's highly-touted drugfighting program in Afghanistan has comprised exactly four local districts there since its 1997 inception. With all due respect, the torching of 400 hectares by the Taliban might actually have been a bit of a show put on for the entertainment of Western antidrug dignitaries

It certainly could not have very much impressed the drug-fighting authorities of neighboring Iran. Last Oct. 15, addressing his superiors on the UN Commission for Drug Control, Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, UNDCP director Arlacchi tried to reassure the delegate from Iran (where the police have been getting shot up TIM: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n1244/a11.html?25239 at an incredible rate by Afghan dope movers passing through) that the UNDCP was negotiating with the Taliban to start up a few more of its projects along the Irani border.

A GENUINE War on Drugs!
At the same time, Arlacchi of the UNDCP is also setting aside about $13 million this year for assistance to Iran's counternarcotics police, who are faring very badly against the heroin movers flooding out of Afghanistan. As the exponential increase in poppy cultivation might indicate, the Afghani dope trade is taking on a major life of its own nowadays. While the Mullahs in Kandahar send out pious remonstrances against the evils of the poppy (Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the Taliban, even decreed last summer that poppy planters should set aside one-third of their tillage for the UN's "alternative-development" crops), they can exert minimal enforcement powers anywhere inside the many opium zones of the country. Their tax collectors do mulct formal ZAKAT and USHR religious tithes from poppy-growers and opium collectors, with the money supposedly earmarked for relief of the poor--and even specifically for the relief of poor women, in what seems to be a misguided attempt to alleviate foreign dismay over the Taliban's medieval policies of "gender apartheid" against women holding jobs, or even receiving standard medical care.

British journalists for papers like the GUARDIAN and OBSERVER have been reporting all this year about the big opium stalls that have become a regular fixture in the Taliban-taxed bazaars of small cities like Sangin. Buyers snap up tons at a time, and transport it primarily to Chuttu, on the edge of the broad Dasht-I-Margi desert that stretches into Iran and Pakistan. Chuttu, where the law is reportedly fashioned by a local warlord, Mullah Haji Bashar Mahmud--who is in perpetual good standing with the mullahs in Kandahar--has become semi-industrialized nowadays, with about 20 fairly sophisticated dope laboratories (About on a technical par with a US dentist's lab) which can turn opium into morphine base or even "finished," albeit still- substandard, heroin. And reporters have seen Taliban tax receipts in for the finished powder product, as well as for the crude opium gum.

The Commodities Market In Opiates
International orders for morphine base and finished smack are phoned in mainly from Dubai on the Arabian peninsula, says the GUARDIAN, placed mainly by the Turkish middlemen who have been feeding the European market for generations. Once a sizeable batch of orders have been received by the Chuttu brokers, they negotiate with Baluchistani tribesmen in Haji Bashar's jurisdiction to load it on convoys of four-wheeled vehicles: usually 12 trucks, four comprised of Baluchis riding shotgun on the load in the center. (Haphazard supply is not a problem, since the Chuttu brokers are said to keep an incredible 10 tons of labbed-down opiate power products in perpetual inventory.) Then it's carted over the deserts, mainly through eastern Iran, to be reloaded onto articulated tractor-trailers for the long haul to the traditional heroin-finishing labs in Turkey, or--in the case of the substandard heroin out of those new Chuttu finishing labs--up through the lawless countries of the Caucasus region around to the Balkans.

Of course, occasionally the Iranian police do manage to surprise one of the convoys coming across the border out of Afghanistan, but they have not fared well at all in their interdiction sorties over this opium-boom year. The convoys out of Chuttu are nowadays armed with mounted .50-caliber machineguns and even shoulder-held SAM missiles, and sophisticated satellite links are used for convoy communications and navigation. The result has been a series of calamitous engagements this year for Iran's narcotics police, whose enforcement budget is clearly a lot tighter than the security outlay these international smack syndicates can disburse. Haji Bashar has recently also landscaped a couple well-appointed airstrips in Helmand province, according to reports, indicating that the European heroin industry might even be more well-budgeted for investments inside Afghanistan than Pino Arlacchi's UNDCP.

The Europeans Have A Better Idea
And just like the new heroin money, any funding the UN implements in Afghanistan, meager though its crop-substitution programs may be, necessarily frees up the Taliban to pay for their own obsessive war against the irredentist "Mujahadeen" warriors who still control substantial parts of the northern border. As the rest of the economy languishes from inattention, with teachers making about $10 a month while opium goes for anything from $37 to $50 a kilo in the bazaars, it's easy to see why the poppy crops just get bigger. So even while continuing its "antidrug" assistance to the Taliban, the UNDCP is concentrating increasing interdiction resources not only to Iran, but to Tajikstan, Turkmenistran, and Uzbekistan, which all abut Afghanistan to the north.

The European Commission in Brussels, on the other hand, has voted to block all funding by the EU Parliament to specific programs in Afghanistan, citing special concern for the Taliban's notorious human-rights abuses, especially against women. Under Mullah Mohammad Omar's interpretation of Islamic Sharia law (considered deviant by just about every other Islamic authority), Afghanistani women are fiercely subjugated, not allowed to work or attend school, or even be treated by male physicians. And since women are deBarred from becoming doctors themselves, the resulting havoc is conspicuous. Women in Afghanistan are moreover not allowed to attend school, or even beg in the streets. As for those USHR and ZAKAT taxes on the dope trade--well, at $55 a kilo in tithe-taxes, and one Chuttu lab alone churning out $5,500 in taxable product a day, and more than 20 similar labs in the vicinity, that is a lot of money being made for those in control. Little or none of it actually appears to be going for the good of Afghani women.

Marco Perduca, the official observer of the UN for the Transnational Radical Party TIM: www.radicalparty.org of the European Parliament, points out to HT that since the UN does not yet officially recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan, they are in essence funding both the fundamentalist government in Kandahar, and the armed "mujahadeen" religious militias that oppose it. "According to a sources of mine in the New York office of the UNDCP," Perduca said, "the UNDCP is not even sure if it is dealing with the local mullahs, who are independent, or officially with the Taliban"

The TRP, which elected several new legislators to the EP last summer, pressed through the vote in the Brussels Parliament to block all funding for specific projects in Afghanistan, as well as Burma, on Dec 2 this year. EU funding will only be restored when the human-rights situation improves, drug production diminishes, and danger to EU and UN personnel in the area is eliminated.

Sandro Tucci in Vienna incidentally also told HT that he knew of no instances where UN personnel in Afghanistan had been attacked, saying that to his knowledge, it simply hasn't happened. Yet a press release from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, dated 15 November 1999, specifically condemns the attacks and destruction of UN property carried out in several locations inside Afghanistan that week.