The more the US and Britain spend on combating drugs in Afghanistan, the more the heroin flows out. What hope have they of winning the war while poppy profits fund the Taliban and taint every level of government? Declan Walsh in The Guardian:
Haji Juma Khan leads something of a charmed existence. A towering tribesman from Afghanistan’s border badlands, Khan uses the title “Haji” because he has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine. But piety is not his sole concern: he is also one of about 20 men who run Afghanistan’s £2bn heroin trade. Business is good. Last year the country’s fields of pretty pink poppies produced a record harvest, sending drug production soaring to new heights, funding the Taliban and thrusting Afghanistan into ever greater chaos. And despite the best efforts of western counter-narcotics specialists – who have spent six years and more than £1.7bn in fighting the heroin trade – Khan is free as a bird.
His empire is centred on Baramcha, a scruffy town in the Chagai Hills on the Pakistani border. Khan, an ethnic Baluch, seized control of this parched area in the dying days of Taliban rule in late 2001 and turned it into a bustling hub of smuggling and gun running. It is dotted with heroin labs: rough shacks where turbaned men, tutored by imported chemists from Iran and elsewhere, use chemicals and vats of boiling water to refine bars of sticky brown opium into bags of powdery white or brown heroin. The drug departs on convoys of high-speed jeeps, bristling with weaponry, that dash across the desert towards the Iranian border. It is then sold to criminal gangs who push the heroin to its end customers: addicts in Europe and Russia.
