A Poor Yield For Afghans' War on Drugs

As Opium, Heroin Trade Booms, Police Net Mainly Smaller Players

A member of the Afghan Eradication Force, above, cut down opium poppies in Helmand province in April. Despite tough new anti-drug laws, Afghan opium cultivation was up 59 percent in 2006, a U.N. report said this month, and smuggling has skyrocketed. At right, a man in Kabul lights a cigarette after smoking heroin, a derivative of opium. (By John Moore -- Getty Images)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The grim-faced man in gray prison pajamas sat on a metal chair Saturday, listening silently while judges and lawyers debated whether he had known about the 37 pounds of heroin found hidden in the car he was driving cross-country to a city near the Iranian border.

No evidence or witnesses were presented. There were glaring gaps in the police report. The car's owner, a man named Shoaib, had not been arrested, so no one could check the defendant's story that Shoaib had given him money and a car to drive home from Kabul after visiting his sister in the hospital.

"People like Shoaib are the smugglers who use poor people like my client for their business," protested the man's attorney, provided by a foreign legal aid foundation. "We should be going after the real criminals who take advantage of the poor."

After a two-hour hearing, the driver, a young house painter and father of two, was sentenced to 16 years in prison. It was a harsh punishment, based on Afghanistan's tough new drug law and meted out by its year-old narcotics court, which is battling corruption, inexperience and a long-broken legal system to crack down on Afghanistan's skyrocketing opium and heroin trade.

Foreign backers of the government of President Hamid Karzai are growing impatient with the continuing production and trafficking. President Bush weighed in Monday, saying in a report to Congress that the Afghan government must be "held accountable" and toughen its fight against drugs even further.

"We are concerned that failure to act decisively now could undermine security, compromise democratic legitimacy, and imperil international support for vital assistance," Bush said in comments accompanying an annually compiled list of major drug-transit or drug-producing countries.

Two weeks ago, the top U.N. anti-drug official aroused new international alarm when he announced here that the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan had increased by 59 percent in the past year. It grew despite a slew of expensive, foreign-funded programs to eradicate poppy fields and motivate Afghan farmers to grow other crops.

Poppy farming, banned in 2000 by the Taliban administration that U.S.-led forces overthrew the following year, quickly revived after the establishment of a U.N.-backed government and has been spreading rapidly ever since. It now accounts for more than half the country's gross national income and provides the raw material for about 75 percent of the world's heroin.

"It's become an industrial production," said Doris Buddenberg, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime here, noting that Afghanistan's opium output this year was a staggering 6,700 tons. Rural poverty, dashed hopes for economic recovery, Taliban blandishments and anti-government sentiment "all added up to more families deciding to grow poppy," she said.

But anti-drug officials and experts here say the expansion of drug smuggling and refining is a far more pernicious problem than poppy farming and could easily turn Afghanistan into another Colombia.

"Our main problem is these former commanders and warlords who are still in power. Now they are district chiefs and local police," said Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadaat, head of the anti-narcotics police force. "The drug mafia is getting more powerful day by day, and the only support we have is from the international community. The senior authorities not only do not cooperate, they get in our way."

Sadaat's force has arrested more than 600 people, but only 35 have been convicted of drug-related crimes. Most, like the house painter, have been small cogs in a fast-growing illicit enterprise. If higher-level traffickers are caught, Sadaat said, "they have personal relations with officials. I get telephone threats. It is a very difficult situation."