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Oct 18th 2001 | GRAZ, KABUL AND TEHRAN
From The Economist print edition

War and drugs
Another powder trail
The Taliban have another weapon: control of most of the world's heroin

EPA

ON SEPTEMBER 10th, the day before the terrorist onslaught on New York, fresh opium was selling in the markets of Afghanistan for as much as $700 a kilo, the highest level for almost a decade. Two weeks later, prices on the streets of Jalalabad or Kandahar had tumbled as low as $100 a kilo. Since Afghan opium accounts for about 70% of the world's heroin production, western countries now fear that, besides all the other problems stemming from that benighted place, they could soon face a flood of cheap Afghan heroin.

In the 1990s, when other forms of farming fell victim to an endless round of internecine wars, Afghanistan greatly increased its cultivation of opium. In 1989, the country produced nearly 1,200 tonnes. A decade later, the harvest had almost quadrupled to an estimated 4,600 tonnes. But by June 2000, in a bid for respectability, the Taliban had started to work with the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP), and banned the growing of opium. The ban slashed this year's harvest to a mere 185 tonnes, the lowest level in living memory and a 95% drop on the previous year. All that ended after September 11th, when the Taliban abruptly stopped co-operating with the UN.

By now only a few weeks of the autumn sowing season are left, and the American-led bombing campaign—particularly heavy around Kandahar, an important opium-growing region—will have disrupted the business. The ban, too, still remains officially in force. So it is hard to predict how big next spring's crop will be. But there are signs that the Afghan government is releasing on to the international market some of the vast stockpile of opium which has been built up during a series of bumper harvests. UN officials believe that 2,800 tonnes of opium, convertible into 280 tonnes of heroin, is in the hands of the Taliban, the al-Qaeda network of militant Islamists, and other Afghan and Pakistani drug lords.

On the wholesale market in Pakistan, this deadly harvest could be worth $1.4 billion. On the streets of London and Milan, processed into white powder, its ultimate value is estimated by Interpol and UN officials at between $40 billion and $80 billion. To put these figures in context, the retail turnover of the European heroin trade is estimated at $20 billion a year. UN officials say the current Afghan stockpile is enough to keep every addict in Europe supplied for three years. It is also enough to allow the Taliban and their allies to dominate the European, Russian and much of the Asian market for another two years, if they can retain control of the stockpile.

The Taliban probably have several motives for releasing the stockpile now. Possibly they are selling off opium to buy weapons, or to build up their supply of hard currency. They may also want to compound the social problems of the western governments which are now their enemies. Whatever the motive, the risk for Europe is awful to contemplate.

Afghanistan's position as the world's main supplier of heroin has been reinforced by 20 years of almost continuous war. It is a country with very little arable land; only 2.6m of its 65m hectares (250,000 square miles) are cultivated. In 1979, when the Soviet Union sent in its army, nearly 85% of the population was dependent on the rural economy. But the anti-Soviet struggle, followed by civil strife, had a disastrous effect on agriculture. A third of the country's farms were abandoned, two-thirds of its villages were bombed, and much of the rural workforce was forced by poverty, dislocation and drought to seek refuge outside the country or in cities such as Kabul and Kandahar.

As the old subsistence economy gave way to a monetised one, opium emerged as one of the few commodities that could quickly be converted into American dollars—which could, in turn, be used to buy arms. Afghanistan's plunge into war also coincided with a drop in production in three other important opium-growing countries. Turkey, Iran and Pakistan all started enforcing strict drug-control laws and bans on opium-growing. This meant that just as opium production was rising in Afghanistan, external factors allowed the country to grab a bigger share of the world market.

For the first few years after they took power in 1996, the Taliban had no compunction about encouraging the planting of opium. Like most food crops, however, opium can grow only on land that is properly irrigated or fed by rain. According to UN officials, the current food shortage partly reflects a conscious decision by the regime to promote the cultivation of opium rather than wheat.

The new Silk Road
How does Afghan heroin reach western markets? Broadly speaking, there are two routes: one passing through Central Asia and Russia, the other through the Balkans.

Well before it reaches Western Europe—in Afghanistan itself, or else in Pakistan, Turkey or former Soviet states—the opium is converted into morphine and then into heroin. The “precursor” chemicals required for this process, such as acetic anhydride, are often diverted illegally from factories in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. In the ramshackle new states which until recently formed the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, drug lords can rely both on lax laws and on the corruptibility of police and customs officers, whose wages are a pittance compared with the sums at stake in the narcotics business.

From these states, the lethal consignments—hidden in truckloads of raisins or walnuts, disguised as bags of flour, or else transported in rusting Soviet-era railway cars—take two different routes. The northern route follows the old Silk Road into Russia, the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. From there, it runs through Scandinavia, Germany and points farther west. The UNODCCP'S director, Pino Arlacchi, says that Russia's “new rich” are among the biggest potential growth markets for heroin-pushers.

Several other ex-Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, with good road and rail routes, have been described in American government reports as increasingly important conduits for heroin from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the German authorities have been struggling to staunch the flow of drugs through Poland. In 1999, for example, 80% of all heroin stopped on Germany's borders was seized at the Polish frontier.

Police are particularly concerned by the arrival on the international market of a strain of high-grade narcotic known as Heroin No. 4, or white heroin, which is estimated to be at least 80% pure. Recent seizures in Germany, Turkey, Finland and Poland have all proved to be white heroin trans-shipped via Central Asia from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The southern, or “Balkan”, route goes principally from Afghanistan to Turkmenistan, across the Caspian Sea, into the Caucasus, then into Turkey, from where the heroin is shipped to Albania and Italy. Other consignments cross Bulgaria and Macedonia in container lorries, finding their way to Serbia, Hungary and Austria. A second route goes through Albania, then across the Adriatic in speed-boats on nocturnal dashes to beaches on the eastern coast of Puglia, and then by motorway into Austria. A third route involves container vessels sailing from Constantza, on the Black Sea, to Turkey and on to Italy.

The one country that all drug traffickers try to avoid is Iran. Some 204 tonnes of opium and 29 tonnes of heroin and morphine were seized in Iran in 1999 by a combination of army battalions and police units deployed on the country's eastern and northern borders, accounting for 85% and 50% respectively of all seizures of opium and opium derivatives (heroin and morphine) in the world. (In Turkey, by contrast, only one-third of a tonne of opium was confiscated in the same year.) Hundreds of Iranian soldiers and policemen have been killed in gun battles with traffickers.

As new routes are established to link the mountains north of Kandahar with the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, a vital role is being played by crime syndicates from Eastern Europe—Ukraine in particular—and the Balkans. Throughout Western Europe, police report that whole sectors of criminal activity are being taken over by ethnic-Albanian syndicates trading on their success as drug-smugglers.

These fraternities, whose origins may be in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia or in the long-established Albanian communities of southern Italy, have no compunction about doing business with Serbian gangsters. They share with them the proceeds from drug- and gun-running, as well as the traffic in prostitutes from Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. According to police, ethnic-Albanian drug-running families are almost impossible to infiltrate because of the closeness of the family and clan structure and the difficulty of the language.

In Prague, Albanians are fighting turf wars to oust Ukrainians controlling the heroin trade, while in London Jamaican pimps—not known for their respect for women's rights—complain of Albanian violence towards the East European prostitutes they control. When police in Oslo made Norway's largest-ever heroin seizure, they discovered that former fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army controlled the drug-distribution chain. Heroin-dealing in Switzerland is dominated by Albanians. This year, much of the money made went to buy arms for the rebels fighting in Macedonia and a strip of southern Serbia.

At the faceless, glass-fronted building in Vienna where UN officials try to keep tabs on this deadly traffic, more information seems to be available about prices in the dusty street markets of the Indian sub-continent than about dealings closer to home. But it is not hard to gather inklings, at least, of the web of connections which now links the bombed-out war zones of Afghanistan with ostensibly calm and prosperous places in Western Europe.

Less than an hour's drive from Vienna is the town of Graz, which serves as a sort of nodal point for connections to the Balkans. This year's October festival was a jolly, bucolic spectacle. But it was not difficult to spot, among the brass bands and folk-dancing, the furtive figures of heroin dealers from northern Albania, plying their trade with white-faced addicts.

Even these sad little transactions have consequences for places hundreds of miles away, says a senior UN police officer who helped to seize two truckloads of weapons—destined for the ethnic-Albanian rebels in Macedonia—at the border between Montenegro and Kosovo this year. He estimates that the anti-aircraft missiles, grenades and anti-tank rockets he captured were part of an arms deal worth around $4m. At least some of that was raised by selling, say, 20 kilos of heroin on the streets of Austria or Switzerland.

UN officials hold out some hope that the heroin market will tighten again once the Afghan stockpile disappears, especially if planting does not resume. The United States and its allies will try to persuade any post-Taliban regime to keep the ban in place. But in a wrecked country, in desperate need of funds, the addiction to opium money will be hard to break.