The green opium poppy fields of Afghanistan are tinged with pink, signalling the beginning of the flowering process, and soon it will be time for harvesting, which this year is expected to produce a bumper crop. In this period the Kabul government, with the support of 5 thousand British troops, is preparing to launch a campaign to uproot and destroy the poppy plantations in an operation that has been announced many times in the past but never really put into practice because of the risk of provoking a violent reaction from the farmers backed up by the Taliban (who use the income from opium to finance their increasingly more aggressive armed resistance). But also because the opium business also involves the Afghan authorities who should be fighting it. All levels of society are involved in this business, from local police to district military commanders, provincial governors, right up to national government officials in Kabul. In point of fact, in recent days news has emerged (from the hard-disks of computers stolen from the USA base at Bagram and traced to local bazaars by the Los Angeles Times) that “high-level opium dealers” include the former governor of the province of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the head of the anti-drug section, General Mohammed Daoud, the Defence Chief of Staff, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, and his predecessor, Field Marshall Mohammed Fahim. The only name missing is that of the most powerful of all bosses, Walid Kazrai, brother of the President, Hamid Karzai.
In this report that name comes out as does all the connivance of the authorities, including the Unites States. But what emerges even more is the roots of the opium problem, which is represented by the extreme poverty of Afghani farmers who are forced to cultivate poppies in order to provide food for their children in the absence of any other real economic alternative for survival. Luckily enough there are also people who know how to tell the truth, like the courageous governor of a district of Helmand: “Bulldozing the fields and shooting the farmers does nothing to eradicate the plague of opium. What’s needed are subsidies and incentives, and there aren’t any. We need cultural and economic development, which requires years and generations. Afghanis will stop cultivating opium only when the authorities stop doing business with the drug dealers and when farmers have real economic alternatives and subsidies. It’s a waste of time pulling up the plants if the roots are left in the ground because the poppies will continue to flower”.   

 
First part
The dusty, noisy bazaar in Lashkargah, crowded with scooters and mopeds, wagons and donkey-drawn carts, tractors overflowing with farmers and pick-up trucks crammed with men armed with Kalashnikovs, is the distribution centre for all Afghan opium. In this period, small crowds of curious bystanders, young and old alike, farmers and policemen, are gathered round the posters and placards that advertise the Karzai government’s anti-drug campaign. A poster shows a bulldozer and soldiers destroying a poppy field while the devil who lives there is forced to flee. The message is clear, even for the many illiterate people who aren’t able to read the written warnings that accompany the pictures. Some of the people smile, but the majority seem worried. For the people here opium is not the devil, it isn’t evil but represents the only method of survival. Whoever owns a plot of fertile land bigger than an orchard uses it to grow poppies.
 
Nizab, poppy grower and father of a family. All you have to do is travel round the province of Helmand to understand the situation. All the fields, and we’re talking about all of them, have been planted with poppies, including the one owned by Nizab, a forty-year-old farmer, thin as a rake, who is busy using a sickle to cut away the weeds that infest the poppy seeds. “There are twenty of us in my family. With the money I get from selling opium I can just about manage to feed my children. Look at this”, he says, taking the broken rubber shoe off one of his children who’s playing nearby, “I haven’t even got enough money to dress them properly! If it wasn’t for opium we’d die of hunger because there’s nothing else. We definitely couldn’t survive with what they give at the market for corn or cotton, which is a tenth of what they pay for opium”.
Another picture on one of the posters shows young Afghanis smoking opium. Afghanistan is now also becoming a consumer and not just a producer of opium. “I know that opium kills people”, Nizab continues, “and not just in you country but also here. It’s not my fault if there are people who have the money to buy drugs for themselves. I haven’t got any money and if I want to feed my children I’m forced to cultivate this stuff. If only I could do it by doing something else! If cotton and corn paid as much as opium, I’d change over straight away. If there was other work I could do for a living, I wouldn’t think twice. But there’s nothing else here except tariak, opium”, Nizab said pointing to his field and the others around him.
“I’ve seen the posters in town and I’ve heard the rumour that the police and British soldiers are coming to destroy our fields. Let them come, we’ll be waiting for them! We’ll defend our fields even if it costs our lives because if they take our fields away from us we’ll die anyway, of hunger! If the Taliban use the money they get from opium to buy arms that’s okay by me because they’re the ones who defend our fields. Now it’d be better if you went before some guard shoots at you from the hill over there”.
 
Karim, opium dealer in the bazaar. The crowd of people at the bazaar in Lashkargah who are looking at the new posters includes Karim, a forty-year-old who is one of the many small opium traders in the town. Like all his colleagues he’s officially a money changer, but in the back of his small, dark shop he sells tariak. “I buy it from the farmers for a hundred dollars a kilo and resell it for 150”, he eventually admits after initially denying for half an hour that he has anything to do with opium. “The price has fallen compared with recent years because of over-production. In 2000 the growers were selling it for 4,000 dollars a kilo because the Taliban had halted production the previous year so as to force the price up”. Karim told me that his clients are Iranians, Pakistanis and some Russians and Turks, although there are also some local people and even American soldiers: “They come here to stock up at the end of their mission so they can take it home as a souvenir”.
Karim is small fry in the opium business chain, just a step up from the farmers who grow it.
The real drug barons, the dealers, live in flashy, fortified villas, drive round in luxurious jeeps and wear gold watches on their wrists.
 
Mister Tariak, the international drug dealer.  After long discussions one of them agrees to speak to us, but without giving his name and without any photos. To look at him, he seems a normal person, and after he understood that he wasn’t dealing with American spies he even became courteous. Whilst sipping green tea and dipping into a jar of raisins, he began to explain his job. “By using middle-men who deal directly with the farmers, I buy opium produced in Helmand and in the other provinces of Afghanistan. Then, in convoys of lories escorted by my guards, I transport it south, in the desert, to the oasis at Baranchà. Don’t bother trying to look for it on a map because it’s not there. There the nomads from the Baloch tribe are given the cargo and take it on camel caravans over the Iranian border. Some other people use different routes and other oases in the desert, since there are hundreds of them, but Baranchà is the most popular. But whatever the route the destination is always Iran . The opium is refined there and transformed into heroin, which from there reaches the western markets via Turkey”.
‘Mister Tariak’ doesn’t want to say how much he earns and glosses over the question. “I’m not the only one who makes money, everybody does: the farmers who otherwise would starve, the police and soldiers who supplement their meagre salaries (40 dollars a month, ed.) by accepting bribes to turn a blind eye or even to escort the convoys towards Iran, and right the way up to their commanders, the provincial governors and their friends in Kabul”. The drug dealer is now at his ease and outlines the depressing picture of a narco-mafia that pervades every social and institutional level in this country, of a business that influences all aspects of Afghanistan from its economy to its politics and even its war.
(It continues with a second part)