Drug Dealing On Afghani Border
This is an excerpt from an article in this Months Harper’s Magazine on smuggling on the Afghani-Pakistani Border by members of the Government of Afghanistan.
“Harper’s Magazine
December 2009
Letter from Kandahar
The master of Spin Boldak
Undercover with Afghanistan’s drug-trafficking border police
*After the first round of national elections closed on August 20, the men
forcibly took Spin Boldak’s ballot boxes into his house for “safekeeping”
overnight. It was just one of the many reports of electoral fraud in
Kandahar Province, which polled overwhelmingly for President Karzai,
according to the independent Election Commission of Afghanistan. The count
from Spin Boldak’s polling stations: Karzai, 8,341; his main challenger, Dr.
Abdullah Abdullah, 4.*
By Matthieu Aikins
Matthieu Aikins is a freelance writer and photographer based in New York
City.
When I arrived in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan
Province, … a Toyota Land Cruiser stopped just ahead of me and two men in the front beckoned to me. When they learned I was a foreign visitor, they invited me for a
sumptuous lunch, and later we drove around the city’s crowded bazaars and
toured a restricted area of the military cantonment. I decided not to
introduce myself as a journalist; they seemed to accept that I was simply a
young traveler interested in poking around their rough corner of the world.
A few days later, one of the men, Jahanzeb, introduced me to his cousin,
Sikander, who soon began taking me out around the city himself. As I had
already discovered, Pashtuns are a frank and friendly lot with visitors, and
one night, cruising around in the Lexus that Sikander used as a mobile
office, he confided to me that he was shipping forty *mon,* or two metric
tons, of opium once a month from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. The
drugs were carried by a convoy, a few dozen heavily armed men in Land
Cruisers, through the desert into Baluchistan and then into Iran. Although
the police in Afghanistan and Pakistan were bribed to give the convoy safe
passage, the Iranian police were not, and encounters with them out in the
desolate borderlands often turned into violent, desperate battles. Once the
convoy made it across the border, the opium was delivered to a group of
Iranian Baluchis. Sikander didn’t accompany the convoys personally, but by
organizing and funding the operation, he said, he was making between
$125,000 and $250,000 in profits each trip.
The most important of Sikander’s connections was Colonel Abdul Razik, the
leader of a tribal militia and border police force that extends across
Kandahar and Helmand provinces—which produce 80 percent of Afghanistan’s
opium, which in turn is nearly 90 percent of the world’s crop. Sikander was
taking care to cultivate his relationship with the colonel. “I am growing a
baby tiger,” he told me. “When it gets large, I will gift it to Razik.” At
thirty years of age, Razik was the most powerful Afghan Border Police
officer in the southern part of the country—a former child refugee who
scrambled to power during the post-9/11 chaos, his rise abetted by a ring of
crooked officials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as by overstretched NATO
commanders who found his control over a key border town useful in their war
against the Taliban. With his prodigious wealth, loyal soldiers, and
connections to top government officials, Razik was seen as a ruthless,
charismatic figure, a man who brooked no opposition to his will. I asked
Sikander if he would take me to Afghanistan for a day to show me Razik’s
operation, and he agreed.
——————————
Two months later, on a hazy morning this past March, we arrived in the town
of Chaman after four hours on a crumbling road over the Khojak Pass. The
town’s Afghan counterpart, Spin Boldak, sits just a few kilometers away,
separated by a high concrete arch and a few dozen rifle-toting guards. After a few tense hours in Chaman, a white Corolla with a gold plastic
armani air-freshener on its dashboard arrived for me. The driver, tall and
clean-shaven with a gap-toothed smile, looked me over as we accelerated
north. “Do you speak Pashto?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Urdu?”
“I speak Persian,” I offered in that language.
“Then just don’t say anything,” he muttered in Dari, the Afghan dialect of
Persian. He examined my half-Asian features and wiry beard, which together
gave me the look of an Afghan from the north—an Uzbek or Hazara, perhaps—and
then placed his red embroidered cap, a typical Pashtun accessory, on my
head.
At the checkpoint, cutting into a side lane, my driver wove, honked, and
waved his way past the black-clad Pakistani and camouflage-clad Afghan
guards. They waved back in recognition. We drove around the arch and onto a
wide, rough-paved highway swirling with dust and traffic. “How are you, my
dear?” the driver asked in Dari, grinning widely. “This is Afghanistan!”
——————————
On the latest United Nations Department of Safety and Security map, which
color-codes Afghanistan to denote levels of risk for U.N. operations, we
would have been, just then, in a tiny island of “high” orange surrounded by
a wide sea of “extreme” red. The orange island is Spin Boldak and the road
to Kandahar city; the red sea stretches across most of the provinces of
Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, and Uruzgan, and farther to the southeast. This
schema is illustrative of four striking facts. First and foremost, it
depicts how a ferocious and increasingly sophisticated insurgency—the
“neo-Taliban,” as many now call them—has spread across the predominantly
Pashtun south and southeast. Second, that red sea also corresponds with the
indefinite deployment of 20,000 additional U.S. soldiers, sent here during
the months leading up to the eighth anniversary of the 2001 invasion, in
October. Intended to bolster the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF), a patchwork of different nations, the increase was a belated
recognition of just how badly the country has fared after years of neglect
and mismanagement. Third, all the red regions on the UNDSS map serve as a
rough approximation of the areas with opium under cultivation, representing
a billion-dollar industry whose tentacles grip both the neo-Taliban and the
fledgling Afghan state, from foot soldier to government minister. And last,
our little island of “high” orange in the sea of “extreme” red is Colonel
Razik’s private domain. Together, these four facts—the intensifying
insurgency, the massive deployment of international troops and assistance,
the opium, and Razik’s relatively secure territory—go a long way toward
explaining why an uneducated thirty-year-old warlord remains firmly
entrenched as an ISAF ally and drug trafficker at a crucial border crossing
like Spin Boldak.
The Afghan-Pakistani border region has long been awash in opium, which is
grown in Afghanistan and then generally smuggled west to the Balkans, via
Iran and Turkey, or shipped out of the port of Karachi to the Gulf states
and Africa. The trade boomed during the Eighties, when both the CIA and the
Pakistani government were happy to turn a blind eye to the drug operations
of the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, since it helped fund the war
against the invading Soviet Union. After the Soviets left, the drugs
remained, and since then opium production in Afghanistan has increased
fourteen-fold, from around 500 tons in the mid-1980s to 6,900 tons this
year. Recent counter narcotics efforts have dramatically reduced cultivation
in the north and east of the country, and so both cultivation and
trafficking have shifted to the south, where security is most tenuous.
Like much of Afghan life, drug operations tend to be organized by tribal and
family affiliations. Colonel Razik has built his own militia around his
Adozai, a prominent branch of the Achakzai, a Pashtun tribe. Historically,
the Achakzai, along with a rival tribe, the Noorzai, have controlled the
smuggling routes around the Khojak Pass, one of the two major mountain
passes that connect the Middle East with the Indian subcontinent, the other
being the more famous Khyber.
My driver, as it turned out, was Razik’s paternal cousin, also named Abdul
Razik—a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the Border Police force, whom the
locals, when they want to distinguish him from his slightly older relation,
call Small Razik.
Colonel Abdul Razik’s rise exemplifies a classic Afghan narrative: the
sudden ascent to power through violence and foreign patronage. Born in Spin
Boldak around the time Soviet troops first entered Afghanistan, Razik grew
up during a period of unprecedented social disruption. His family’s fortunes
soared when Esmat Muslim, a warlord from the same Adozai branch of the
Achakzai, came to prominence in the region. A former military officer who
had been trained by the Russians, Esmat became a mujahideen commander during
the early 1980s and organized a force drawn mainly from his tribe; Razik’s
uncle Mansour became one of his principal lieutenants. Notorious for his
treachery and cruelty, Esmat shattered the delicate peace that had existed
between the Achakzai and Noorzai smuggling clans, and he eventually sided
with the Communist government in return for control over the border trade.
In the end, Esmat was driven out of Spin Boldak in 1988 by a combined
mujahideen offensive, and later died of cancer in Moscow.
With the collapse of the central government in the early 1990s, Kandahar
descended into anarchy. Local warlords divided up and pillaged the province.
Even the city of Kandahar itself was split among several commanders, and
throughout the province roads were strangled by hundreds of checkpoints at
which theft, rape, and murder were common.
It was in reaction to such depredations by the warlords that the Taliban
emerged, in 1994, from the districts around Kandahar city. Their first major
victory was the capture of Spin Boldak on October 12, 1994, an event
encouraged by the Pakistani trucking mafia, who saw the group as a means of
clearing the roads north to Central Asia. Consequently, the balance between
the Achakzai, who were linked to the traditional aristocracy, and the
Noorzai, who were more congenial to a radical Islamist movement, swung
again. Noorzai tribal figures such as Mullah Akhtar Jan Noorzai, a former
commander in Spin Boldak, and Hajji Bashir Noorzai, one of the region’s
largest drug smugglers, became influential supporters of the Taliban. (In
April, Bashir Noorzai was sentenced to life in a U.S. prison on
drug–trafficking charges, after having been lured to New York City by
federal agents.) Razik’s uncle Mansour, who had survived Esmat’s departure
by rejoining the mujahideen, was hanged from the gun of a tank north of Spin
Boldak by the Taliban. Razik’s father also was killed, and his family, along
with many Achakzai tribal leaders, fled into exile in Pakistan—until the
U.S.-led invasion arrived like a thunderbolt.
In November of 2001, the CIA paid Gul Agha Shirzai, who had been the
ostensible governor of Kandahar during the chaos before the Taliban, to
assemble an anti-Taliban militia in Quetta with the goal of capturing the
province. Shirzai put together a force that drew mainly on Achakzai
tribesmen. “The Americans said, ‘We will help you take your country back
from the terrorists,’” recalled Fayda Mohammad, the commander of this
Achakzai contingent, when I visited him on a return trip in May at his
modest, somewhat dilapidated two-story house in Spin Boldak. Abdul Razik
also had been part of the unit, but few remember him from that time; he was
then about twenty-two years old and completely obscure. “No one knew who he
was,” said Abdul Wali, a Mohammadzai tribesman who had been a fighter with
the group and later joined the Afghan National Army.
The Americans had given the group cash to buy weapons in Pakistan and
directly supplied more by helicopter—along with a group of Special Forces
soldiers—once the militia had infiltrated Afghanistan and occupied
Takht-e-Pul, a strategic pass between Spin Boldak and Kandahar city. With
U.S. airstrikes clearing the way, Shirzai’s forces advanced to the airport.
The provincial capital itself was in the process of being handed over, after
extensive negotiations between Hamid Karzai and the Taliban, to Mullah
Naqib, a well-respected retired mujahideen commander. But American advisers
had come to believe that Naqib was too close to the Taliban, and so they
encouraged Gul Agha Shirzai—against Karzai’s wishes—to wrest control from
Naqib and retake the governorship of the province. Naqib, fearing U.S.
airpower, backed off.
Shirzai, who is from the Barakzai tribe, had relied heavily on the Achakzai
for muscle, and now they wanted to claim their reward. “There was a deal
between me and Gul Agha,” Fayda told me. “He went to Kandahar city, and he
said, ‘You and your tribe take the security of the border.’”
That summer saw the return of widespread opium cultivation in the south of
Afghanistan, after the Taliban had banned it the year before. With stocks
running low, the price paid to farmers for opium shot up to $250 per kilo at
harvesttime, compared with $28 in 2000. The nascent central government had
little influence; every warlord was running his own small fiefdom, and the
economic incentives were clear. Fayda Mohammad, tasked with policing one of
the world’s largest drug-smuggling routes, soon found his job impossible to
do with any honor. He and his men would stop trucks full of opium or hashish
only to find them under the protection of prominent officials. On one
occasion, he claimed, he was forced into releasing a truck under direct
pressure from a powerful minister in Kabul. Another driver carried a letter
from Bacha Shirzai, Governor Shirzai’s brother.
I was learning, however, that Boldak is a special sort of border town. The
big business there is cars—right-hand-drive cars, to be precise, used cars
bought mainly in Japan and shipped in duty-free via Dubai. Afghanistan is a
left-hand-drive country, but the vehicles are intended for Pakistan. They
are sent overland from Karachi in sealed containers, unpacked in Spin
Boldak, and sent right back across the border, with forged papers and
baksheesh given to various officials along the way.
This may seem like a strange journey, but it’s a simple matter of
comparative advantage. Under the Afghan Transit Trade agreement, which dates
to 1965, Pakistan allows Afghanistan-bound goods to traverse its territory
duty-free. Afghanistan is a free port with minimal duties, whereas in
Pakistan taxes and customs can double or even triple a vehicle’s cost. This
price differential, combined with widespread corruption and inefficient law
enforcement in both countries, has created an enormous market for smuggling.
In fact, the smuggling of goods may be the biggest economic sector in
Afghanistan, larger even than the opium trade, according to World Bank
reports.
As a result, places like Spin Boldak have become markets for all sorts of
goods to be smuggled back into Pakistan. Each day, new shipping containers
arrived, and Samiullah and I would often go to watch them being cracked open
and unloaded. The haul was not just vehicles. It was all the cast-off crud
of the First World, anything conceivably worth being shipped here: used
microwave ovens, guitars, DVD players, bicycles, car stereos, TV sets, Beta
camcorders, keyboards, propane stoves, motorized wheelchairs, generators,
winches, children’s toys, clothing. I watched one bent, beturbaned old man
hauling a tangled bundle of PlayStation controllers slung over his shoulder
like a bushel of thatching.
Maintaining a sort of order in this chaos was Razik’s Border Police, who
protected the trade and in turn fed off it. Of course, some Border Police officers were engaged in the serious business of securing Spin Boldak. The most active I met was Commander Hajji Janan, who wore a U.S. Army combat uniform with a captain’s insignia and a 1st Infantry Division patch. Janan had been a police officer in the Taliban
regime before he sensed the changing winds of fortune, shaved his beard, and
joined his tribesmen in the new border force. Today, he roams around town in
a green police Dodge Ranger, accompanied by a posse of five young soldiers
carrying grenade launchers.
The most consistently uttered praise of Colonel Razik in Spin Boldak is that
he has maintained a level of security unparalleled in Kandahar Province. The
town is now far safer than Kandahar city, an hour and a half’s drive north.
“There is no water, no trees, no gardens here,” one refugee from Helmand
told me, “but there is *amniat,*” pronouncing the Persian word for security
as if it were a sacred name. Razik’s success was attributed to his prowess
in combat—“He was always at the front of the fighting,” said a cousin of
Samiullah’s—and also to his equally well-known ruthlessness. Stories abound
of men chained to the rocks at Takht-e-Pul and then executed with rockets;
of long stretches spent in Razik’s private prisons; of thieves’ corpses
being left, on orders, in the streets for three days.
Essential, too, were groups like Commander Janan’s, which, relative to
typical Afghan police, were trained and paid better. Nor was Razik the only
one who found them useful. The Border Police’s hand-in-glove cooperation
with the local ISAF forces in Boldak was evident the first day I met Janan.
That evening, Samiullah got a call and handed me his phone. A somewhat
baffled-sounding American accent came through on the line: “Hi, yeah, is
this Matthieu? This is Captain Cowles, with the U.S. Army. We heard from
Hajji Janan that there was a Canadian citizen alone here in Spin Boldak,
and, well, we just wanted to make sure that you were all right.”
I assured him that I was, but the next morning Janan came by the house and
asked if I would come to the ISAF just outside of town. “It is optional,” he
said.
I got in the truck and we rode out with his men to Forward Operating Base
Spin Boldak, which is manned by a mix of Canadian, U.S., and Afghan National
Army soldiers. A gruff American sergeant named McDermott drove out with an
interpreter to meet us and bring us back to the base. I noticed that Ahmad
Shah and his crew were allowed to bring their weapons, though McDermott
frisked me.
Captain Cowles, a young and solicitous type, got me a soft drink. I produced
my passport, and the officers started questioning me, with a combination of
suspicion and concern, about what I was doing in the region. I couldn’t say
that I was a journalist in front of Janan, for whom the interpreter was
translating our conversation, but I managed to convince them that I wasn’t a
spy, or worse. “We thought maybe it might be another case of that American
Taliban, what’s his name, Lindh,” said Tim Bonnacci, a Canadian Army
captain, only half in jest.
“You know, this is a battle space,” Cowles told me. I said I was fine, since
I was under the protection of the local Achakzai tribe. “Well, this is a
mixed Noorzai and Achakzai area, so you should be concerned,” he said. While
a Canadian sergeant went off to photocopy my passport, some of the officers
spoke privately to Janan in a corner. I sat down next to Cowles and asked
him if perhaps Janan’s wearing a U.S. Army uniform—with the Stars and
Stripes on it, no less—might be sending the wrong message. “Oh, the locals
know who he is,” answered Cowles. I said I meant that his policies and
actions might be interpreted as being American. “I don’t think there’s any
worry about that,” he said, sweeping the air with his hand. “Hajji Janan is
one of our best guys. We don’t go anywhere without them.”
Mohammad Naeem Lalai, a thirty-five-year-old Achakzai from Spin Boldak,
joined the Border Police about the same time that Abdul Razik did. He and
Razik once were close friends, but they had a bitter falling-out that led to
Lalai’s quitting the force in February of last year. Lalai told me he had
become disgusted with Razik’s corruption and had tried, unsuccessfully, to
persuade him to change course.
Lalai estimated that Razik pulls in between $5 million and $6 million per
month in revenues, money he has invested in properties in Kabul and Kandahar
and also abroad, in Dubai and Tajikistan. The racket itself is run directly
by a select group of his commanders, who facilitate drug shipments and
collect payment from the smugglers. Lalai showed me a list with their
names—Janan was among them—and the names of the five biggest drug dealers in
Spin Boldak. He said that Razik’s men also had imported shipping containers
full of acetic anhydride, a chemical used in heroin manufacturing, from
China.
Lalai was the only person I found who would openly accuse Razik of drug
smuggling. The conjoined mention of “Abdul Razik” and “drug smuggling” by a
Western journalist in Kandahar was enough to cast a chill over most
interviews. But on condition of anonymity, two other Kandahari
politicians—Achakzai tribal elders with clean reputations and who were
widely respected—made similar assertions to me about Razik’s involvement in
drug smuggling, his private prisons, his vast wealth, and his entanglement
in a network of corrupt high officials and major drug smugglers. An official
at the Kandahar office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission,
who asked not to be named, agreed that Razik was operating his own prisons
and conducting extrajudicial executions.
A grim irony of the rising pro-Taliban sentiments in the south is that the
United States and its allies often returned to power the same forces
responsible for the worst period in southerners’ memory—the post–Soviet
“mujahideen nights.” In the case of Gul Agha Shirzai (now governor of
Nangarhar but still a major force in Kandahar), the same man occupied the
exact same position; in the case of Razik, nephew of the notorious Mansour,
it is the restoration of an heir. By installing these characters and then
protecting them by force of arms, the ISAF has come to be associated, in the
minds of many Afghans, with their criminality and abuses. “We’re doing the
Taliban’s work for them,” said one international official with years of
experience in counternarcotics here.
In the initial scramble to invade Afghanistan in 2001, there was a certain
pragmatism to enlisting the mujahideen, who represented the best means of
taking over the country in the absence of a substantial U.S. ground
presence. But those troops were diverted to Iraq, and the ISAF was cobbled
together slowly, arriving too late and with too few soldiers to upend the
warlords’ rule. Canadian forces didn’t deploy to Kandahar until 2006, and
even then their contingent of 2,500 was stretched far too thin to control
one of the most critical provinces in Afghanistan; the base at Spin Boldak
was largely abandoned for seven months at the end of 2006, when troops were
needed for the offensive in Panjwaii.
“We were facing the worst-case scenario in 2006—a conventional takeover by
Taliban forces,” said Brigadier General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian
commander of ISAF forces in Kandahar Province. He was proud that his
country’s small contingent had been able to hold the insurgency more or less
at bay. But he admitted that the life of the average Kandahari had become
less secure as the Taliban began to tighten their grip on Kandahar city. “I
don’t have the capacity to make sure someone doesn’t rip their guts out at
night.”
I asked General Vance if he was aware that Razik was directly involved in
the drug trade. “Yes,” he said. “We are completely aware that there are a
number of illicit activities being run out of that border station.” He had
few illusions about Razik, with whom he interacts directly. “He runs
effective security ops that are designed to make sure that the business end
of his life runs smoothly, and there is a collateral effect on public
order,” he told me. “Ideally, it should be the other way around. The tragedy
of Kandahar is that it’s hard to find that paragon of civic virtue.”
I cut out about half the article. You can read the whole piece at Harpers. The essential thing here is that this is a complex situation and we are entering into a culture that has been involved with the trade of high value commodities for centuries. This is part of the old Silk Road. The author is simply describing a reality. But what he does not describe is the centuries of traditions in which have developed these networks. New persons come and go but the essential traditions of tribes trading over these passes in valuables, whether it is Toyotas or opium, it is not going to change.
These people who are now smugglers would in a different time be traders. The borders that exist now are recent historical constructs that have only modified the nature of the profit making opportunities of the tribal leaders and traders. The entry of the Soviets in the 1970’s and the USA in the 00’s has only distorted the local balance by giving guns and power to warlords that will cause a reaction against them by the other factions of the civil society. Once the weapons and money from the west are gone then the locals will be able to sort things out themselves.
India, Iran and Pakistan have interests in the region to the south east and west. To the north is Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They should be the ones working directly with the regime in Afghanistan. Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have interest because they have borders with Afghanistan and India because it is the major regional power.
NATO’s involvement in this region is simply stirring up the pot and causing unnecessary deaths. We need to get out of the region and limit our efforts to diplomacy, economic aid and perhaps a CIA strike force operating behind the scenes to keep an eye on Al Qaeda. That is all we should have had in the first place instead of this incredibly stupid and wasteful invasion.