If you think the U.S. military isn’t serious about this soft power, hearts-and-minds stuff, it’s worth considering a recent report by an Army Human Terrain System research team on saffron.

That’s right: The U.S. Army commissioned a detailed, heavily footnoted 22-page report on saffron as a potential cash crop for Afghan farmers – and as a potential alternative to growing opium poppy. In a nice touch, the report even includes a recipe for sabzi pilau: a Persian rice dish with saffron, spinach and meat. Delicious!

Devising alternative livelihoods for Afghan farmers involved in the poppy trade is a serious business, and thus far no one has been able to come up with a viable and sustainable alternative. For Afghanistan’s impoverished farmers, opium is almost ideal: it is a high-value, low weight crop that requires minimal water; the paste collected during the harvest is easy to store and transport; and the buyers come to directly to you. More:

Kabul: The men, hollow-eyed and matted, start coming at dawn, shuffling into the remains of the old Soviet Cultural Center, which in its day staged films celebrating the glories of a new era.

These days, the shell of the abandoned building serves as perhaps the world’s largest gathering spot for men looking to satisfy their lust for heroin and opium. Stooping in the darkened caverns of the place, amid the waste and exhalations of hundreds of others, the men partake of the drug that has begun to wreak its deathly magic in the very country where it is produced.

One such man, who called himself Mohammed Ofzal, struck a match beneath a piece of foil and sucked in the blue smoke that rose from the liquefying little mass. Then he sat back in a crouch, legs shaking a little. His eyes, glazed and half-shut, stared blankly at the floor. More:

In the last eight years, the Afghan Taliban have greatly expanded their illicit activities, morphing into a force more violent and ruthless than when they were in power from 1996 to 2001 and building up an economic empire worth almost half a billion dollars. Their activities are diverse: In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan’s farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities.

They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don’t comply. District-level Taliban commanders collect fees as high as $250 per truck passing through their control zones from import-export firms and trucking companies, even “taxing” the tankers carrying jet fuel to NATO air bases in Kandahar and Bagram. More:

]]> http://www.asianwindow.com/afghanistan/the-criminals-running-the-af-pak-border/feed/ 0 http://www.asianwindow.com/afghanistan/flower-power/ http://www.asianwindow.com/afghanistan/flower-power/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:45:46 +0000 asianwindow http://asianwindow.wordpress.com/?p=2416 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.

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Khalida’s father says she’s 9-or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.

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