Afghan farmers can prosper by producing the world’s finest melons, pomegranates and grapes, says Elliot Wilson, but first they must be weaned off growing the opium poppy. In the Spectator:
Modern-day Afghanistan conjures up many fearsome images, from rocket-launchers and retreating Soviet tanks to mujahedin warriors and Taleban zealots. Yet this war-ravaged central Asian state, which has to date repelled every barbarian invader foolish enough to set foot on its dusty red soil, has another, much gentler aspect to its national character. When no one is looking and the men have hung up their Kalashnikovs for the day, many of them attend to their second career: growing melons.
And not just any melons. Afghanistan has been producing the world’s finest kharbouza for at least 4,500 years. Persian emperors cried when they ate them, as did Mughal Shahs. Today, countries across the Middle East and the subcontinent can’t get enough of them. The swankiest Mumbai dinner party just isn’t up to snuff without a fine, sweet, Afghan melon for dessert.
And there’s more than melons in the Afghan fruit basket. Wealthy merchant families in Saudi Arabia will eat Helmand table grapes until they can’t stand up. Kunduz strawberries, tiny and succulent, are also favoured on regional platters, alongside pistachios, paper-shelled almonds and raisins. The country is poised to become a major exporter of pomegranates – fizzing with life-affirming antioxidants – and prime morel mushrooms, literally worth their weight in silver and growing wild by the truckload in the south and west of the country. More:
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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How the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency. In The Independent, UK, Jerome Starkey reports from Kunduz:
The heroin flooding Britain’s streets is threatening the lives of UK troops in Afghanistan, an Independent investigation can reveal.
Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs into Britain are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers told The Independent how Russian arms dealers meet Taliban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan’s desert. The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns – and sometimes a bit of sex on the side.
The drugs are destined for Britain’s streets. The guns go straight to the Taliban front line.
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