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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe soldiers have run for some distance, over paddies of rice and wheat and across a graveyard where shards of stone and tattered flags mark the dead. Now, as they sprint across a broad dry riverbed, there's the sudden roar of helicopters slinging low over the small village 500 yards away. The soldiers clamber up footpaths and break for their objectives\u2014two compounds separated by a narrow dirt alley.\n\nThe first team kicks in a metal door to one of the compounds. Inside, a howling woman cowers against a wall while another tugs her loose clothes tighter and tries to cover her wild hair. A third woman holds a bawling child and mocks the intruders.\n\nEven without translation, it's clear what she is saying: \"Put away your guns. You won't find anything here. Mohammad Kharim is not so stupid as you are.\"\n\nAccording to his dossier, Mohammad Kharim is 50 years old. He is wanted along with another man from the village, Haji Mohammad, for allegedly operating a heroin lab and smuggling drugs across the Pakistani border. Their pursuers are not coalition soldiers or American Marines but members of the Afghan National Interdiction Unit, an elite counternarcotics force mentored by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The several dozen Afghans and handful of DEA agents are here in this small border village, tucked in mountains so steep they appear as a mash of thumbprints on a contour map, to seize 900 liters of acetic anhydride, an essential chemical used to convert morphine into heroin.\n\nSeveral soldiers swarm up mud steps, kicking in doors and windows, and still more search a low-ceilinged barn\u2014but they turn up nothing. At the gate to the second compound, a dog snarls, and a retarded man babbles crazily and spins in the dirt. Inside the soldiers discover three bales of hashish and several fist-sized clumps of raw opium. But still no sign of the chemicals, and no sign of the two men they're seeking. In fact, there's no sign of any men at all. They've all fled to the fields beyond, where they warily watch the spectacle unfold.\n\nAs a few soldiers dump the hash down a stream and tag the opium for evidence, others spy Kharim out in one of the paddies. They rush toward him with weapons drawn, but Kharim doesn't run. \"What opium?\" he asks from behind his hennaed beard. \"What chemicals?\" They secure his hands with plastic flex cuffs, slip taped goggles over his eyes, and force him to his knees. In a few days, though, I am told by a DEA agent that after booking and questioning and more denials, his bluff has set him free.\n\nThe teams will later hear that the chemicals were secreted to the fields, but now there's no time to continue the search. The helicopters attract too much attention, and crowds of men from local villages and farms have gathered on the surrounding hilltops. \"If we stay here much longer, it's going to be a problem,\" a DEA agent says. So it's back across the riverbed, through the graveyard, and over the paddies to the waiting convoy beyond\u2014mission not accomplished.\n\nIn most other countries, of course, some four kilograms of raw opium and 120 kilograms of hashish would make an impressive haul. But when it comes to Afghanistan, supplier of 90 percent of the world's opiates, drugs are measured in metric tons and not ounces. The raid did almost nothing to slow the trade that underwrites everything here.\n\n\n\nIn the five years since the U.S.-led coalition toppled the fundamentalist Taliban, there has been some genuine progress in Afghanistan. The camps that harbored Osama bin Laden and his mujahideen were destroyed; elections were held, and a parliament convened. Children attend schools, and women walk unaccompanied through city and village streets. The capital's stadium hosts soccer games and not ecutions.\n\nBut the insurgency is undeniably alive\u2014and getting stronger. And the inability of President Hamid Karzai's administration to provide basic services and security has left many Afghans angry with their government and its American overlords. The frustration is palpable even in the capital, where reconstruction has been most lavish. This past May, Kabul suffered its worst violence since the Taliban were run out of town, when a brake failure caused a heavy truck in an American military convoy to plow into a busy market, killing several Afghans. As a seething crowd closed in on them, the unnerved Americans opened fire and fled the scene. \"They are saying that the truck didn't have brakes, but this is untrue,\" one man shouted at me from the site of the accident. \"The Americans were drunk. Why should we trust any of them?\"\n\nWith shouts of \"Death to America\" and \"Death to Karzai,\" the mob pushed toward the presidential palace, looting stores and torching cars. Machine guns rattled across the city center, several Westerners were attacked, and an NGO and a Chinese brothel were burned to the ground. On two occasions, photographer Paolo Pellegrin and I were chased and nearly overtaken, escaping only when our car punched through a side street. With a senior Afghan police general and his aides, we hid out in a government minister's house for hours, eating Spam and fava beans as the mob rampaged outside.\n\n\"We'll go to the Ministry of Interior to do our jobs now,\" the general joked as the shooting stopped. A week later, Karzai purged the police force's senior ranks for ineptitude. Western and Afghan officials largely dismissed the riot as opportunism and hooliganism, but the story on the ground, in Kabul and throughout the country, said otherwise. In the two weeks preceding the Kabul riots, more than 350 people were killed across Afghanistan, significantly more than the casualties in Iraq during the same time period. Most of the deaths were the result of coalition combat, but there were also assassinations, car bombs, and roadside explosives\u2014against civilians and aid workers and even in the relatively peaceful provinces of the north and west. \"Three years ago, the Taliban operated in squad-sized units,\" noted retired general Barry McCaffrey after he visited Afghanistan this spring. \"Last year they operated in company-sized units of one-hundred-plus men. This year the Taliban are operating in battalion-sized units of 400-plus men. They now have excellent weapons, new IED technology, commercial communications gear, and new field equipment.\" The former U.S. drug czar concluded that \"drug money and international financial support have energized their operations.\"\n\nThings are grimmest in the country's southern provinces, where the U.S. military recently ceded control to NATO forces and where the Taliban's ranks are stronger than at any point since the American invasion. Their resurgence has less to do with a rise in Islamic fundamentalism than with drugs. In the remote deserts and rugged mountains of the south, the Taliban have forged an alliance with the drug lords. \"It's a symbiotic relationship,\" says Stuart Nash, a senior counternarcotics official with the Justice Department. \"The terrorists benefit both economically and by having smuggling routes preestablished to smuggle whatever it is they want to smuggle. The drug lords benefit from the protection the Taliban offers them from the central government.\"\n\nThe danger the narcotics trade poses isn't lost on Karzai. \"Poppy cultivation is more dangerous than terrorism,\" he has said. \"If we fail to eradicate poppy, the poppy would eliminate us.\" But while the coalition has pledged billions of dollars to wean farmers from harvesting opium, only limited resources are devoted to actually attacking the traffickers' networks.\n\nThe failure to employ a tactic that would seem obvious to anyone the least bit familiar with Afghanistan's problems goes back to a decision five years ago, in the feverish months after September 11, when U.S. military planners clashed with other U.S. agencies and coalition members over the importance of counternarcotics. Steve Casteel, chief of DEA intelligence at the time, recalls National Security Council strategy sessions he attended at the White House. \"My position, and that of the British, was you can't do anything in Afghanistan unless you take care of the drug issue,\" he told me. \"The White House and Pentagon position was that drugs don't matter. Their three priorities were, one, get Karzai in there; two, have there be no human-rights violations; and three, get a functioning government. The Brits argued and argued and argued against it, but ultimately that was the decision the White House made.\" It's a decision that now seriously threatens the country's future. Name your crisis in Afghanistan\u2014insurgency, corruption, porous borders, disintegrating government control\u2014and at its source you'll find the raw, sticky gum of opium.\n\n\n\nAt the heavily fortified U.S.-embassy compound in Kabul, a U.S. counternarcotics official stated plainly, \"The big problem in this country is criminality and corruption. It's huge. It's just rampant. It's rife. It's beyond anything we've seen in Colombia or Mexico or any place else. And drugs are the principal fuel for that.\" The accusations go straight to the palace itself, where Ahmed Wali Karzai, younger brother of the president, is reputed to be a major drug lord\u2014though the palace has consistently denied Ahmed's involvement, and such allegations are a popular way to discredit political enemies in Afghanistan. But not every one can be false.\n\nIn a low building just steps from Parliament, Major General Sayed Kamal Sadaat, the surprisingly gregarious, owlish chief of Afghanistan's counternarcotics police, sat hunched over his cluttered desk, dwarfed by stacks of paperwork and a wall-sized map of the country behind him.\n\nThe general is one of the few public servants regarded by Western officials as clean, and when I asked what might happen to him if he dared to build cases against senior government officials, the general leaned back in his desk chair and said, \"Everybody knows who is doing what, but nobody can do anything. If the government really wants to support us, like your government does the CIA and DEA and other big agencies, then we could go against the big names.\"\n\nSadaat's counternarcotics police are headquartered in a fortified compound that, I'm told, at one point belonged to a prominent and brutal mujahideen leader. Now it serves as a safe house for most of the drugs seized in Afghanistan. One of Sadaat's aides led me down rough concrete steps to the mujahideen leader's personal dungeon. The acrid smell of raw opium and hashish was overpowering. \"This was not a pleasant place,\" he said needlessly. There were several cells, each labeled according to the drugs it now held. Cells 1 and 2 were filled with hashish in big burlap sacks and feed bags, stacked taller than a man. Cell 3 held opium, shoulder high, and cell 4 was waistdeep in heroin. There were at least four more cells, but bales of hashish blocked the hallway. In total, the compound held some four tons of heroin, twelve tons of opium, and twenty-four tons of hashish, all seized the previous year. Using average British street prices\u2014most of Europe's drugs come from Afghanistan\u2014a back-of-the-envelope sketch put the haul at $980 million. A few weeks later, the Afghans burned it all.\n\n\n\nIn mid-June, I joined the Afghan Eradication Force as it destroyed the last of the country's poppy harvests in the far northern province of Badakhshan. The government's well-publicized antipoppy campaign had made little impact on cultivation, and the brightly colored flowers covered the hillsides. After withstanding weeks of local stonewalling and even gunfire, the teams now moved from field to field, slashing poppies with crude scythes and switches. In one plot, a farmer stood with his sons surveying the damage to his crops. \"We will starve,\" he lamented. \"We have nothing now. The government doesn't help, and now I have no choice but to grow poppies next year.\"\n\nThe farmer was being modest. The bulbs on his thrashed poppies were big and fat, some scored and scraped for opium as many as eight times. In a few days' time, he would take his opium to market and be paid $100 per kilogram. Then a steady stream of donkeys, SUVs, and police cars would ferry the opium to a crude mountain laboratory to be boiled, reduced, and dried into cakes of morphine. Then it would be transformed with chemicals into heroin, refined, and smuggled across the rugged mountains to Tajikistan and to organized-crime syndicates beyond. By the time it reaches the streets of London or Stockholm, a bulk kilogram of heroin will retail for $40,000. Broken into gram bags, that kilogram can fetch almost $100,000\u2014all but 2 percent of which the Afghan economy will never see.\n\nBut what a lot of damage that 2 percent can cause. Despite Afghanistan's status as the world's largest narcotics bazaar, there has traditionally been a surprisingly low demand for drugs. That's not the case anymore. During the thirty years of war that began with the 1979 Soviet invasion, a third of the Afghan population fled. Most became refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, both nations with astounding addiction problems. The U.N. estimates that nearly 3 percent of Iranians abuse opiates\u2014the highest level in the world\u2014and of those, as many as a quarter are infected with HIV.\n\n\"There are thousands, tens of thousands, of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran who are addicted,\" says Tariq Suliman, director of the Nejat Center, a bare-bones nonprofit treatment facility in Kabul. \"Now they are returning home. If you come again next year, the number of addicts will be higher. The door is open. The problems are finally coming into Afghanistan instead of from it.\"\n\nEarly one morning, we set out for the Shah-do-Shamshira, the mosque of the King of Two Swords. It's a squat two-story mosque on the Kabul River with saffron walls and light blue minarets, named after a seventh-century Islamic marauder who lost his head not far from here but still managed to slaughter a good many Hindus before finally dying. Now the tiles outside the mosque are littered with the bodies of addicts.\n\nThe sun was just rising as we met a thin, grubby man called Khalifa. He led us to a gap in a metal railing, and we climbed down an embankment to the dark recesses beneath a bridge. The ground was littered with syringes and garbage, and it smelled of urine and feces. Khalifa took his spot beside two other addicts wrapped in blankets, and the three huddled forms looked like mounds of trash themselves.\n\nWith one half the foil of a discarded cigarette box, they each rolled a tight stem; on the other half, now flattened and smoothed, they sprinkled heroin. With matches that shook in their hands, they chased the black beads of heroin down the foil and sucked the smoke through their stems. Khalifa gave an ugly cough, and the other two murmured in good-natured appreciation. They passed over the foil strip half a dozen times until there was nothing left but a dark stain.\n\nTheir morning fix over, the men struggled to their feet. Khalifa coughed again and spat, his phlegm deep yellow and flecked with black. As if in apology, he said he prefers to inject, and he pulled up his sleeve to reveal a thick black vein pockmarked with tracks. \"Most who take medicine this way are from Iran,\" he said. \"We brought the addiction to Afghanistan.\"\n\n\n\nIt's a measure of the fear inspired by the Taliban that during a single growing season in 2000, they managed to stamp out opium production. Prior to that, tas on farmers, refiners, and traffickers brought the Taliban movement as much as $27 million per year, according to the U.N., and opium production actually doubled under the religious movement's iron fist.\n\nBut the spike in opium under the Taliban alarmed the international community. In the office he keeps in Kabul, Vahid Mojdeh, a former senior official in the Taliban foreign ministry, sat upon a settee carved with poppy flowers and spoke authoritatively about the external pressures against the Taliban: \"I remember I was in a meeting at the ministry where there were several diplomats from European countries. These diplomats were telling us that issues like women's rights, Osama bin Laden\u2026 &#145;Things like this are not important to us,' they said. &#145;What is important are drugs, which are killing in our countries.' \" He shrugged and added, \"The Taliban did not care about international relations.\"\n\nBut when pressure began to come from neighboring Islamic states and it was clear that Afghanistan's drugs were killing not just infidels but good Muslims too, the Taliban took notice, and banning opium began to make sense: It would save Muslims, keep its neighbors and the West at bay, and potentially bring in a bundle of U.N. aid. These were all miscalculations, but the drastic reduction did lead to one windfall: It allowed the Taliban to centralize the drug trade under themselves. \"I remember Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader and partner to Osama bin Laden] asked his people to buy the [remaining] opium from farmers across the country at a cheap price,\" Mojdeh recalled. \"I don't know what they did with it.\"\n\nWestern officials can hazard a guess. As the opium supply was reduced, prices jumped from just $150 per kilogram in September 2000 to almost $750 in the days before September 11. The Taliban continued to tax refiners and traffickers at exorbitant rates, and may even have sold the opium themselves from seized stockpiles. \"The more obvious reason [for the ban] is that the international community wanted it,\" recalled a British diplomat in Kabul. \"The other reason, which is the more cynical one, is that the price of opium shot up and the Taliban profited enormously from it.\" Added an American official, \"They were not such religious scholars that they didn't take advantage of that opportunity to make a shitload of money to fund their war effort.\"\n\nMullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who spent nearly four years in Guant\u00E1namo for his role as Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and now resides in Kabul under government surveillance, largely agreed with Mojdeh's account. But he drew the line at the accusation that the Taliban trafficked as well as tad. \"Who is saying this?\" he demanded over tea and sweets. \"I'm not rejecting it completely. But the leadership, they were not involved. If Mullah Omar knew this, he would not allow it.\"\n\nAlmost no one questions that Mullah Omar and his remnant Taliban are involved in the opium business now. Opium farmers are tad by Taliban commanders and reportedly receive \"night letters\" threatening harm should they not grow poppies.\n\nBut outside of a handful of counternarcotics officials, the United States was slow to grasp the problem's enormity. As the drug trade and its Taliban connections grew stronger, American officials washed their hands and blamed the British government, which headed the coalition's counternarcotics efforts. In one embarrassing instance last May, a confidential cable from the U.S. embassy labeling the Brits \"substantially responsible\" for failed eradication efforts landed on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. A U.S. official in Kabul, discussing the incident, defended the British effort. \"That was not fair to do,\" he said. \"Frankly, you needed both players to get involved. And if you want to be critical, you should be critical of the United States government for being on the sidelines as long as they were.\"\n\nBut the Pentagon still staunchly resists\u2014and even hampers\u2014any aggressive role in drug interdictions. When DEA squads were first dispatched to Afghanistan last spring, the Pentagon agreed to provide air support for four operations a month, a critical concession if the heroin labs and smuggling routes hidden in the country's rugged mountains were to be reached. Fifteen months and numerous DEA requests later, only two operations have so far received support. \"It was complete and utter bullshit,\" a DEA agent in Afghanistan fumed. \"About all I've seen out here is excuse after excuse after excuse. Rather than find a way to help us, they find a way to frustrate us. The military's done nothing they promised they would do.\"\n\nThe situation became so bad, a senior Justice Department official confided, that last summer Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seeking his help. The response was halfhearted.\n\nIf there were any lingering doubts about the Pentagon's reluctance, they were erased by an officer who facilitates military embeds. When I told him I was interested in reporting on drugs and the insurgency, he quickly replied that an embed would be a waste of everyone's time. \"Our job,\" he said, \"has nothing to do with drugs.\"\n\n\n\nOf course, fighting the insurgency has everything to do with drugs, and that fight is at its most vicious in Helmand Province, which jabs north from Pakistan and abuts the aptly named Deserts of Death and Hell. Since the coalition invasion five years ago, it has become a stronghold not only for the Taliban but also for opium. U.N. officials predict this year's harvest in Helmand will more than double and could account for more than half of the world's opiates.\n\nThis summer the military launched a massive offensive in Helmand dubbed Operation Mountain Thrust. At the tip of the spear here was Lieutenant Colonel Chris Toner, whose base was just outside Musa Qala, the opium heartland of Helmand. His bare-bones outpost, erected just four days before I arrived, was a mere flyspeck in the desert, accessible only by helicopter or heavily armed convoy.\n\n\"What we've got here is almost like a big ink stain,\" Toner said as he surveyed several maps dotted with pushpins identifying troop locations. \"The center of gravity for an insurgency is the population. But the center of gravity for a counterinsurgency is the population, too. We're all relying on the same thing. My job is to isolate the population from the enemy.\" Toner pointed to three red bos representing Taliban redoubts, drawn around clusters of villages. \"Put your pen down on these,\" he said, \"and this thing\"\u2014coalition control\u2014\"goes wider and wider and wider.\"\n\nBut the insurgency is not always confined to tidy red bos. On a broiling day in June, just over a ridge from the outpost in a village called Sarbesa, one of Toner's patrols was ambushed.\n\nCrouched behind a foot-high mud ridge, six soldiers held the front line, taking fire and returning fire across dry paddies stubbled with stalks of harvested poppies. The Taliban fighters were a mere 125 yards ahead, and over the next several hours the battle unfolded in fits and starts. For long periods the Taliban went to ground; then suddenly shadows would move, a patch of rocks in front of us would explode, and shots would ricochet by.\n\nApache helicopters made repeated runs over the village, strafing the Taliban who were dug in. Suddenly the earth shook from two impacts fifty yards ahead, and then a third missile slammed into the ground thirty yards to our left. The noise was deafening. Dirt rained down, followed by ash and the thick smell of explosives. \"Somebody get the fuck to those Apaches and tell 'em we're fuckin' down here!\" a sergeant yelled.\n\nAs dusk settled, the troops withdrew, and later that night surveillance spotted women and old men removing bodies. Of the estimated forty Taliban fighters, perhaps as many as twenty-two were dead. Given the intensity of the fighting, Toner thought a senior Taliban commander was present. He sent his soldiers back to sweep Sarbesa the next day. Two ambushed Humvees were recovered, their reinforced windows spiderwebbed from stopped bullets. There were pools and trails of blood, an armful of human intestines on the ground, and a pile of blood-soaked clothes nearby. As night drew near, a half-dozen men approached a checkpoint on foot. \"Are the Taliban gone?\" they said. \"May we go back to our lives?\"\n\nIt would be easy to frame this scene as one of violence to no end in the middle of nowhere. But if the fight in Afghanistan is going to be won\u2014and it really has to be won, because an anarchic Afghanistan is a doorway to more trouble in civilized places far beyond Helmand\u2014this is the unglamorous way in which it must happen: Move forces into a tiny area; chase the Taliban away; give the locals something to depend on other than the largesse of drug lords demanding poppy. That's the task, and it will take a commitment of troops and weapons and money for many years, which isn't quite the war the Pentagon had in mind.\n\nAbout a month after the firefight in Sarbesa, Operation Mountain Thrust came to an end, and the United States handed over control of the southern provinces to NATO forces led by the British commander Lieutenant General David Richards.\n\nAt a meeting with reporters in Kabul, Richards signaled his show would be run differently. \"For the last four years, some very brutal people have been developing their little fiefdoms down there and exporting a lot of opium to the rest of the world, both near and far,\" he said. \"This is a very noble cause we're engaged in. We have got to liberate the people there from that scourge of those warlords.\"\n\nFive years after the idea was first introduced, the coalition will finally take on its most deeply rooted enemy.\n\nSam Dealey is a writer based in Washington, D.C."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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