Thriving Afghan drug trade has friends in high places

When it's harvest time in the poppy fields of Kandahar, dust-covered Taliban fighters pull up on their motorbikes to collect a 10 percent tax on the crop. Afghan police arrive in Ford Ranger pickups -- bought with U.S. aid money -- and demand their cut of the cash in exchange for promises to skip the farms during annual eradication.
Then, usually late one afternoon, a drug trafficker will roll up in his Toyota Land Cruiser with black-tinted windows and send a footman to pay the farmers in cash. The boss inside the Land Cruiser never shows his face, but the farmer says he presumes it's a local powerbroker who has ties to the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

Everyone wants a piece of the action, said farmer Abdul Satar, a thin man with rough hands who tends about half an acre of poppy just south of Kandahar. ''There is no one to complain to,'' he said, sitting in the shade of an orange tree. ``Most of the government officials are involved.''

Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium, which was worth some $3.4 billion to Afghan exporters last year. For a cut of that, Afghan officials open their highways to opium and heroin trafficking, allow public land to be used for growing opium poppies and protect drug dealers.

COZY RELATIONSHIPS

The drug trade funnels hundreds of millions of dollars each year to drug barons and the resurgent Taliban, the militant Islamist group that has killed an estimated 450 American troops in Afghanistan since 2001 and seeks to overthrow the fledgling democracy here.

What's more, Afghan officials' involvement in the drug trade suggests that American tax dollars are supporting the corrupt officials who protect the Taliban's efforts to raise money from the drug trade, money the militants use to buy weapons that kill U.S. soldiers.

Islam forbids the use of opium and heroin -- the Taliban outlawed poppy growing in 2000 -- but the militants now justify the drug production by saying it's not for domestic consumption but rather to sell abroad as part of a holy war against the West. Under the Taliban regime, the biggest Afghan opium crop was roughly 4,500 tons in 1999, far below the record 8,200 tons in 2007.

The booming drug trade threatens the stability of the Afghan government, and with it America's efforts to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The threat has grown not only because of the cozy relationships among drug lords, militants and corrupt officials, but also because of apathy among Western powers.

From the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks until last year, the United States and other NATO countries did little to address the problem, according to a Western counter-narcotics official in Afghanistan.

''We all realized that it will take a long time to win this war, but we can lose it in a couple years if we don't take this [drug] problem by the horns,'' said the official, who asked for anonymity so that he could speak more freely.

To unravel the ties among militants, opium and the government, McClatchy interviewed more than two dozen current and past Afghan officials, poppy farmers and others familiar with the drug trade. Seven former Afghan governors and security commanders said they had firsthand knowledge of local or national officials who were transporting or selling drugs or protecting those who did.

Most sources feared retribution. One man was killed a week after he spoke to McClatchy. Another called a week after the interview and said he hadn't left home in days, fearful McClatchy's calls to verify his story would bring trouble. A third met on the condition that a reporter promise not to tell anyone he still lives in Kabul.

''In this country, if someone really tells the truth he will have no place to live,'' said Agha Saqeb, who served as the police chief in Kandahar, in the heart of Afghanistan's opium belt, from 2007 to 2008. Naming officials who profit from drugs, he said, would get him killed: ``They are still in power and they could harm me.''

The embassies of the United States, Britain and Canada -- the countries principally behind counter-narcotics in Afghanistan -- declined to comment. A State Department report issued earlier this year flatly noted that: ``Many Afghan government officials are believed to profit from the drug trade.''

It also said: ``Regrettably, no major drug trafficker has been arrested or convicted in Afghanistan since 2006.''

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Kabul also refused to comment. Afghan and Western observers said the DEA had been hampered by inadequate staffing and by the difficulty of cracking down on drug trafficking in a country where local officials were implicated in it.

A KARZAI CONNECTION?

The corruption allegedly reaches the highest levels of Afghanistan's political elite. According to multiple former Afghan officials, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai and head of the provincial council in Kandahar, routinely manipulates judicial and police officials to facilitate shipments of opium and heroin.

Ahmed Wali Karzai and his defenders retort that the U.S. government never has formally accused him of any wrongdoing.

In Kabul, President Karzai's office said no one could prove his brother had anything to do with trafficking.

Ahmed Wali Karzai himself is defensive, saying that the accusations are part of a political conspiracy against his brother, the president. When he was asked recently about the allegations linking him to drugs and crime, he threatened to assault a visiting McClatchy reporter.

According to several former Afghan officials in the region, however, the major drug traffickers in southern Afghanistan don't worry much about getting caught because they're working under the protection of Karzai and other top officials.

For example, a former top Afghan intelligence official recounted an incident from five years ago, when, he said, his men arrested a Taliban commander involved with drugs at a key trafficking point between Helmand and the Pakistani border.

Late on the evening of the arrest, a local prosecutor dropped by and said Ahmed Wali Karzai wanted the militant released, according to Dad Mohammed Khan, who was the national intelligence directorate chief of Helmand province for about three years before he became a member of the parliament.

Khan said he released the Taliban commander, a man known as Haji Abdul Rahim, because he didn't want to tangle with the president's brother.

A week after his conversation with McClatchy, Khan -- a large man who had a reputation for dealing with enemies ruthlessly -- was killed by a roadside bomb that most attribute to the Taliban.

Asked for comment about Dad Mohammed Khan's allegation and others during an interview at his palatial Kandahar home, which is protected by guard shacks, perimeter walls and sand-filled roadblocks, Ahmed Wali Karzai said he had nothing to do with drugs.