The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk

Drug Control and Development Unit in a back street of Jalalabad. I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. In 1996, Afghanistan was the world’s leading supplier of illicit opium, producing at least 2,200 metric tons of opium— about 80 per cent of western Europe’s heroin. Afghans are not immune. You can see them in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, still-living witnesses to the corruption of heroin. “It’s good for the Afghan people to see them,” a Western aid official says coldly. “Now they can see the effect of all those poppy fields they grow—and if they are as Islamic as they claim they are, maybe they’ll stop producing opium.” He smiles grimly. “Or maybe not.”
    Probably not. The eastern Nangarhar province is now responsible for 80 per cent of the country’s poppy cultivation—for 64 per cent of western Europe’s heroin—and laboratories have now been transferred from Pakistan to a frontier strip inside Afghanistan, producing hundreds of kilos of heroin a day, fortified with anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles to withstand a military offensive. Local government officials in Jalalabad claim to have eradicated 30,000 hectares of opium and hashish fields over the past two years, but their efforts—brave enough given the firepower of the drug producers—seem as hopeless as the world’s attempts to find a solution to drug abuse.
    In Engineer Mahmoud’s office, the problem is simple enough. A map on the wall depicts Nangarhar with a rash of red pimples along its eastern edge, a pox of opium fields and laboratories that are targets for Mahmoud’s armed commandos. “We have been eradicating hashish fields, using our weapons to force the farmers to plough up the land,” he proclaims. “We are taking our own bulldozers to plough up some of the poppy fields. We take our guns and rockets with us and the farmers can do nothing to stop our work. Now our
shura
[council] has called the ulema to lecture the people on the evils of drug production, quoting from the Koran to support their words. And for the first time, we have been able to destroy hashish fields without using force.” Mahmoud and his ten-strong staff have been heartened by the United Nations’ support for his project. On the open market in Jalalabad, the farmers were receiving a mere $140 for seven kilos of hashish, just over $250 for seven kilos of opium—around the same price they would have received for grain. So the UN provided wheat seeds for those farmers who transferred from drug production, on the grounds that they would make the same profits in the Jalalabad markets.
    Only a few months earlier—and here is the strange geography that touched bin Laden’s contacts—Engineer Mahmoud visited Washington. “The U.S. drugs prevention authorities took me to their new headquarters—you would not believe how big it is,” he said. “It is half the size of Jalalabad city. And when I went inside, it is very luxurious and has many, many computers. They have all this money there— but none for us who are trying to stop the drug production.” Engineer Mahmoud’s senior staff received just under $50 a month and his senior assistant, Shamsul Hag, claimed that the drugs unit had to buy 4,000 kilos of maize seed to distribute to farmers the previous month. But the western NGOs in Jalalabad had little time for all this. “Haji Qadir, the governor of Jalalabad, went to the UN drugs people in Islamabad,” one of them said, “and told him: ‘Look, I have destroyed twenty thousand hectares of opium fields—now you must help me because the people are waiting for your help.’ But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them