Five years after the wanton attack on New York's twin towers, symbols of America's economic might, the world is a changed place. It has changed for the worse. In the name of fighting terrorism certain proponents of "peace", "democracy" and champions of human rights are colonising oil and mineral rich countries, conspiring to topple some "unwanted" governments and lending support to drug trade and mass acceptance of fascism in the name of reforming the world.
The Taliban regime of Afghanistan, according to a report in The Economist (August 16-22, 2003), had clamped down on poppy growing with an iron fist, and banned it completely in 2000. Production collapsed from its peak of over 4,500 tonnes in 1999 to 185 tonnes in 2001.
However, the ban did not cover trade, and opiates kept on flowing into Central Asia. After demise of the Taliban, poppy cultivation re-appeared with a vengeance, in spite of a fresh ban issued by US.installed Hamid Karzai's government. According to UN estimates, production increased to 3,400 tonnes in 2002. It is alleged in many reports that brother of Hamid Karzai is one of the leading narco dealers even in post-election era.
Afghanistan once again dominates world production of opium, with almost three-quarters of the total annual global yield (see table below). Afghanistan is a marginal country. About 80 percent of Afghans depend on what they can grow. But Afghanistan lacks water and cultivable land. Even in the halcyon 1970s, less than 5 percent of the land was irrigated.
The war halved that. Then during the seven-year-long drought in some places, most of the livestock died and staple crops failed. In the south and south-west of the country, water-tables are dangerously low. Even with the best possible governance, that part of Afghanistan is a poor proposition.
Drought was an ally of the Taliban. They could not have pushed north without picking up farmers along the way who, having lost their wheat and goats to drought, thought to earn something by shouldering a gun. Rebuilding the irrigation system would help a bit: creating reservoirs in the mountains of the central Hazarajat region could do more: both would be hugely costly. But the US is not interested in rebuilding Afghanistan.
Its plan of colonising Afghanistan had three motives: to attain strategic supremacy over China by holding key points in South Asia, use of Afghan Card against Central Asian States if they refuse to toe US policy interests and control drug-for-arms trade. Three-quarters of the world's opium and nearly Europe's entire heroin, originate in Afghanistan. Drought is now an ally of opium traders.
Pushtun herders used to move livestock around the country. Now they move opium; buying, selling and trading. They use the economics of the old North Sea herring trade, locking in farmers by paying advances on next year's harvest. Afghanistan and Britain - the lead donor for counter-narcotics - say they have evidence drug money is funding terrorism in southern Afghanistan.
It is happening in the presence of US forces in the country that earlier used high-tech instruments to locate and kill Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. One wonders why they do not intercept huge drug consignments moving freely from Afghanistan to neighbouring Central Asian States, Iran and Pakistan.
With the ousting of Taliban regime, opium production in Afghanistan, by far the world's biggest producer, shot back to mid-1990s levels in 2002. The area of cultivated coca bush fell by 18 percent during 2002, thanks mainly to a 30 percent fall in Colombia, easily the world's largest producer.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) estimates (see data below) that about 200 million people in the world now take illegal drugs, mostly cannabis. Many more countries report increase rather than decrease in drug-taking, but UNODC thinks that growth in demand is slowing.
On September 11th 2001 the western world was brutally reminded about Afghanistan, it also had its memory nudged about Central Asia. In the 1980s, the Afghan mujahideen resisting Soviet occupation had received generous American support.
But in 1989, when Russian troops packed their bags and went home, American interest in Afghanistan waned. Once the Central Asian countries had become independent from the former Soviet Union in 1991, America concentrated its attention in the region on Soviet nuclear leftovers, the decommissioning of which it hailed as a great success. When the Taliban took over in 1996, the Americans did not seem overly concerned that the bearded rulers and their al Qaeda friends were supporting radical Islamic groups in Central Asia.
The threat of terrorism from Islamist extremists is also a powerful argument for Russia, America and China to maintain an interest in the region. The continuing instability in Afghanistan remains an important risk factor for Central Asia. But the spectre of the Talibanisation of the whole region probably never had much substance.
Central Asian politics are shaped more by tribal and ethnic allegiances than by ideology, so Islamic movements in the region are likely to remain fragmented. During the civil war in Tajikistan, for example, mullahs from the Kulab region supported the government, whereas former communist apparatchiks from the Gharm region overwhelmingly joined the IRP-dominated UTO. Moreover, there seems to be little genuine popular support for setting up Islamic states in the region.
However, the ground for religious extremism remains fertile. Poverty, lack of political freedom, ignorance about Islam that is exploited by ruthless outsiders, and money from the drug trade make up an explosive cocktail. Most of the region's economies have still not fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet system.
Poverty is widespread in all the countries, especially in rural areas, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. For many local politicians, such economic factors, along with natural disasters and border problems, constitute far bigger headaches than Islamic radicalism.
ISMAIL KHAN: WARLORD AND AMIR OF THE WEST: Ismail Khan, the supreme warlord of western Afghanistan, rules Herat with little reference to the government in Kabul. Ismail has been elevated to giddy heights by showing unprecedented determination during the jihad against the Soviet army and later the Taliban. Ismail's soldiers have shot dead dozens of innocents in botched raids, allegedly on Taliban forces. The poor's demands for wells and schools, shown on local television, only serve to burnish his image as a benign potentate.
His speeches, dwelling on his jihad, his narrow escapes, and his fatherly aspect, show the beginnings of a personality cult. Ismail Khan, however, is popular because he offers Herat's security - something Kabul can never guarantee for the area, and can only guarantee for itself with foreign help. Herat is the safest city in Afghanistan, a fact Ismail emphasised when he declined a proffered peacekeeping force on his patch.
Foreign aid workers based in Herat think Ismail a brigand, but not of the worst order. Talk of a secret-police state after the fashion of neighbouring Turkmenistan is overblown, they say. Besides, the security afforded by Ismail and his jihadis allows the UN and other agencies to do better work in more remote places.
This is an improvement, certainly in the south of the country, where incursions by neo-Taliban have driven out nearly all aid workers. Ismail's would-be emirate has been underwritten by customs revenues intended for Kabul. The Herat Customs House handles most of the country's trade with neighbouring Iran.
It is a sprawling, Kiplingesque empire of ledgers and barefoot clerks, surrounded by a glinting sea of cars and containers. Ismail has had no problem skimming off the top for the past 18 months. The head of the Customs, Abdul Azim Rahimi, estimates the official take of the Customs this year to be $160,000 a day. Ismail's share of that has been hit by a recent agreement with Mr Karzai which saw him hand over $20m in cash to Kabul, with more to follow. But he will still be able to earn on undeclared imports and bribes: locals figure on $750m in backhanders for every shipping container they bring in. It says much about Afghanistan that this theft is not a disaster.
Ismail and his jihadis (holy warriors) appear to live simply. Some of the Customs money is even spent on improving Herat. It could have been better used, undoubtedly, but probably not by officials in Kabul. By stealing at source, the argument goes, Ismail is at least enriching somewhere outside the capital. Iran looms large in the Afghan west. Opium and Afghan men are smuggled into Iran, goods and home-sick Afghan refugees come the other way.
Poorer Heratis are unhappy about Ismail's links with Tehran. It was Iran, they point out, which disarmed Ismail's enemies after the Taliban fell. Still, there are signs that Iran now wants to sideline Ismail in favour of Mr Karzai, America's man. "He must fall into line with Kabul," says a senior Iranian diplomat tartly. Iran hopes to loosen Ismail's grip on trade with a new border post to the south and now signs deals, such as for a new road between Iran and Tajikistan, directly with the central government.
Only a stable and united Afghanistan, Iran now thinks, will rid it of its 2 million Afghan refugees and stem the flow of opium across its borders. It has pledged $500m in assistance to Kabul over the next five years. Ismail is a problem.
But intelligence officials - American as well as Iranian - have yet to identify a replacement. He knows he will be tolerated for as long as he can guarantee security in the west. This risk, anointing a destabilising personality cult. But with security problems in much of the country, little progress on poverty and infrastructure, and an exploding drug trade; it is a risk the government in Kabul will probably have to take-The Economist, July 19-25, 2003.
Opposition forces in Central Asia, together with human-rights activists, argue that the Islamic threat is being exaggerated to crush all forms of dissent, religious or otherwise.
But even those who think that Islamic radicalism and terrorism are real dangers criticise the governments' heavy-handed methods of controlling religion. Central Asia has become a main transit route for opium and heroin from Afghanistan to the streets of Europe. The UN reckons that about a quarter of all heroin coming out of Afghanistan passes through the region. Traditionally, Afghan opium was trafficked through Pakistan and Iran.
Both countries remain important export routes, but a northern alternative via Central Asia developed rapidly in the early 1990s, partly because of Pakistan's and Iran's efforts to crack down on the traffic and partly because Russian border guards were withdrawn from most of the region when the Soviet Union collapsed. The civil war in Tajikistan in 1992-97 also proved beneficial to the drugs trade.
THE AFGHAN PLAGUE: For many Afghans living in rural areas, producing opium is the only way to survive. Before the 2000 ban, prices had slumped to $35 a kilo, or $1,100 a hectare, an income close to that for legal crops; but since then prices have risen again, making poppy cultivation correspondingly more attractive. At the end of 2005, farmers could get $540 a kilo, or over $16,000 a hectare, which no other crop could rival.
In 2004, opium production in Afghanistan generated up to $2.2 billion, or almost 20% of GDP. The number of drug users in Central Asia as a whole is thought to be close to 400,000, having increased six fold in the 1990s, one of the highest growth rates in the world, according to the UN.
Almost 1% of the population over 15 years of age uses opiates, three times more than in Western Europe. Most addicts are hooked on heroin and use needles. HIV/AIDs, which remain largely unmeasured, are believed to be spreading uncontrollably. Addiction has also been feeding petty crime and prostitution across the region.
(To be concluded)
(The writer specialises in studying global narcotics trade and narco-terrorism. He is author of two books on the subject, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin and Pakistan: Drug-trap to Debt-trap.)
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