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Overview
Author David Macdonald has worked as a drugs advisor to the UN. Based on his extensive experience, this book breaks down the myths surrounding the cultivation and consumption of drugs, providing a detailed analysis of the history of drug use within the country. He examines the impact of over 25 years of continuous conflict, and shows how poverty and instability has led to an increase in drugs consumption. He also considers the recent rise in the use of pharmaceutical drugs, resulting in dangerous chemical cocktails and analyses the effect of Afghanistan's drug trade on neighbouring countries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745326177 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2007 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
[Afghanistan] promises mystery, a movement back into time of medieval chivalry and medieval cruelty, an absence of the modern world that is both thrilling and disturbing.
Our country is completely different from those that are 100 years ahead of us. The freedom these Afghans from the West have seen is not suitable for here. It is more appropriate to consider Afghanistan as a place of enormous complexity that has been subject to a constant state of flux throughout history rather than to view it as somehow caught in a time-warp, with life going on as it has always done.
To outsiders it had seemed more of a fairytale than a real place: it had never been a single country but a historically improbable amalgam of races and cultures, each with its own treasuries of custom, languages and visions of the world, its own saints, heroes and outlaws, an impossible place to understand as a whole.
In trying to describe, understand and explain drug use in Afghanistan useful comparisons and analogies can be made with other areas of the world. The golden chessboard that constitutes the global drug trade is all-encompassing and far-reaching. Apart from Afghanistan, I have worked in the drugs field in several such areas, for example, in southern Africa with Basarwa (Kalahari Bushmen), in Pakistan with Afghan refugees and even in Scotland with the urban dispossessed. Although the cultural contexts may be very different, common patterns and themes inevitably emerge and some aspects remain remarkably similar despite the separation of historical, geographical and cultural distance. This book has been written with a wide readership in mind: the specialist who is interested in drugs and their myriad forms and uses, the academic or development worker looking at the interface between Afghan history, politics and drugs and the general reader who is curious (and concerned) about how 'fragmenting countries show the integrating ones the dark side of their common present'.
Afghanistan itself is a multi-faceted place, consisting historically of several distinct tribal groups with different social structures, hierarchies and styles of political leadership, not to mention culture and customs. It is a country of marked contrasts and complexities. There are still mountain valley communities three or more days' donkey ride from the nearest bazaar, untouched by the Soviet invasion or the tyranny of the Taliban, where life has changed little in centuries. In September 2005, election officials had to hire 1,200 donkeys, 300 horses, 24 camels and nine helicopters just to deliver ballot boxes to the remoter areas of the country. At the other end of the social spectrum, mobile phone shops compete for customers in the congested vehicle-clogged streets of the booming capital Kabul where 4x4s roar past grand new buildings sprouting up like mushrooms, funded (at least partly) by profits from the drug trade and other criminal activities such as extortion, protection racketeering and the diversion of money from international aid programmes.
Some years ago a colleague visited a small village on a high plateau near Kabul in the winter where he sat outside wrapped in a blanket drinking tea with the village headman, similarly clad to keep out the biting cold. A small child ran past wearing only a thin cotton nightdress. Noticing that the child was blue with cold my colleague asked, 'Aren't you concerned that the cold is affecting that child and he might get sick?' The headman laughed, shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'If he is strong he will survive, if he is weak he will die.'
This response was a simple acknowledgement of the harsh reality of daily life in a war-torn country where insecurity, extreme poverty, malnutrition and lack of healthcare is endemic in many areas. Apart from what is left of the close-knit extended family system after decades of war and social dislocation, there are few social safety nets available for the ordinary Afghan.
THE CRITICAL SOCIAL DIVIDE
At the risk of over-simplification, two of the main competing social forces at work in contemporary Afghanistan can be described as traditional conservative Islam at one end of the spectrum and a more secular liberal modernity, with its emphasis on democratic processes such as the emancipation of women and individual human rights, at the other. Anybody who lives or works in Afghanistan will daily experience the increasing duality and tensions posed by these two competing forces. Abdul Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf is a warlord and founder of the Ittihad-i-Islami Bara-i Azadi Afghanistan (Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan) mujahideen group. Based in Paghman a few miles to the west of Kabul he is an elected member of the Wolesi Jirga. He is in no doubt about who Afghanistan belongs to. It belongs to the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets, not to members of the Afghan diaspora returning from neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Iran, as well as further afield from Australia, Europe and the Americas. Sayyaf urges that:
This nation is a Mujahid nation. Stones, trees, rivers, woods, mountains and deserts in this country are Mujahideen. This country exists because of the Mujahideen. This country was in Russia's throat, before the Mujahideen took it back out, by God's mercy. Then it was nearly destroyed by Taliban and terrorists and again the Mujahideen saved it. Mujahideen do not need posts and money, but the government needs the Mujahideen.
An interview with Ismail Khan, the deposed self-styled Emir of Herat, one of the most famous, and probably most prosperous, of the Afghan warlords, provides an answer to the charge of how he feels about being described as a warlord:
During the Soviet invasion, I was called Ashrar, during the Taliban regime Topakai and now they call me a Warlord. The people who call me that do not have a good understanding of Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, guns shed blood but there is a difference between the gun one raises for protection of one's country and honour and the gun one raises to scare and harass. If we had weapons during the Jihad, it was to protect our rights, values, honour, freedom and independence and to ensure the security of our people, not to abuse them.
Significantly, Khan does not say why he, like many other mujahideen commanders, retained a large standing army and its weaponry long after the jihad against the Soviet invaders had ended and a central government had been established in Kabul. While security of the populace may be one answer, the maintenance of personal power including a private militia secured by the huge profits derived from taxing the lucrative border trade with Iran, is perhaps a more appropriate one.
Nevertheless, both Khan and Sayyaf make the important point that it all depends which side of the ideological fence you are standing on. Looking at Afghanistan through a modern democratic lens, groups defined as warlords are often perceived as predatory violators of human rights who are more likely to prey on communities than to protect them. Many documented examples of this are cited in Chapter 6. From the more traditional Islamic and pre-modern perspective of the warlords such activities can be rationalised by pointing out that the social relationships and structures of the 'new' Afghanistan as defined by foreigners and Afghan returnees are not the social relationships and structures that they live in, understand or even want.
The fate of Afghanistan will largely be determined by which of these ideologies comes to prevail in the country over the next few decades, or in what manner they become reconciled and integrated. Already some warlords and militia commanders have come to be perceived as legitimate autonomous local leaders, others have been removed from the power bases of their provincial fiefdoms and co-opted to central government posts or elsewhere, and some have been elected to the Wolesi Jirga. However, any legitimisation process will have to consider that while 'some of these leaders are responsible, most are old-fashioned warlords — in many cases the very same warlords whose depredations, including toward women, paved the way for the rise of the Taliban'. The parliamentary elections held in September 2005 included 207 'commander-candidates' with their own private militias who had all been identified before the poll. Only 32 of them were disqualified from standing and a significant number of the rest were elected. Others, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, had never bought into the new democratic process in the first place.
In 2003 the former Afghan leader Maluvi Younis Khalis (who subsequently died at the age of 87 in July 2006) announced a holy war against US troops in Afghanistan, asking Afghans to resist the 'crusaders' as had their Iraqi brethren. Apart from calling the presidential election in Afghanistan 'a drama', he is also reported as saying, 'A puppet government has been installed in Afghanistan. It does not represent the aspirations of the Afghan nation. We consider struggling and waging a holy war against this government our religious obligation.' He also claimed that foreign 'invaders' had endangered Afghanistan's identity by introducing 'obscenity, vulgarity and an ideology of disbelievers'.
Yunus Qanooni, a senior political and military adviser to the assassinated mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and the chief rival to Hamid Karzai in the 2004 presidential election, as well as former Education and Interior Minister in the Interim Government and now an elected independent Member of Parliament, believes that the mujahideen are crucial to Afghanistan's future. He also believes that 'there is no place for secularism in Afghanistan', although he stresses the progressive and tolerant nature of Islam, rejecting out of hand its repressive reinterpretation by the Taliban.
However, the dynamic of this critical social divide between a relatively westernised urban elite and a rural Afghan tribal society traditionally dominated by mullahs, maliks and khans, is not new, it started with the modernising reforms that King Habibullah tried to initiate in the early part of the twentieth century. His son Amanullah who succeeded him then began to develop programmes for the reform, secularisation and modernisation of the Afghan state and society until he was deposed by the bandit leader, Bacha-i-Saqao, in 1928. Amanullah had returned from a 'Grand Tour' of several western countries, India, Egypt and Turkey, and had tried to initiate over-ambitious and unrealistic reforms such as the abolition of purdah, monogamy for government employees, a minimum age for marriage and curtailment of the mullahs' power. At the time one popularly held explanation given for this deviation from Afghan Islamic tradition was that Amanullah had embraced Catholicism during the tour and 'had become deranged through drinking alcohol and eating pork'.
ACROSS THE CULTURAL DIVIDE
The continuing polarity between the rules and regulations that govern human rights-based secular modernisation and the customs and traditions of conservative Islam was exemplified by the furore over the publication of a bestselling book by the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad called The Bookseller of Kabul. While conducting research on the bookseller in question, Mohammad Shah Rais, whose books had been looted by the mujahideen and burned by both the communists and the Taliban, Seierstad was invited into his home as a guest with no restrictions placed on her with regard to which family members she could talk to. In her own words she became 'big-endered' with equal access to both the separate male and female worlds of the Afghan family. The resultant book mainly provided a detailed account of the social relationships in the family with Shah appearing as 'a cruel, tyrannical patriarch' who treated the women of his family like chattels and his sister as 'a virtual slave'. It is a document, according to another journalist, of 'the appalling subjugation of Afghan women, their cultural invisibility, the hardship of their lives', although at the same time, 'Seierstad seems not to understand anything about Afghan pride or the social ruination of dishonour'. Shah, understandably, felt let down by what he saw as a betrayal of trust, and accused Seierstad of impugning and defaming not only himself but the entire Afghan nation and he sued her in the European courts for compensation and damages.
Interestingly, it has been suggested that Seierstad's excessive use of journalistic licence may have led to her spinning a few scorpion tales of her own. A Norwegian professor of anthropology and Middle Eastern studies, Unni Wikan, has suggested that some of the book may not be authentic as it is doubtful that such insights into 'hearts and minds' was possible. Furthermore, 'she has revealed the secrets of the women which is shameful and dishonourable. It will be regarded as an affront for its lack of respect for Afghans and Muslims.' Who knows what the consequences of such revelations may be for Shah and his family, now easily identifiable and open to gossip and ridicule.
This conflict between Seierstad and Shah symbolises the problem, and the unintended consequences, of interpreting Afghan cultural traditions and practices through the lens of a modern human rights perspective. While universal human rights are to be fully endorsed and respected, in many developing countries like Afghanistan they may make little sense, as concepts based on individualism may be culturally inappropriate, if not nonsensical and politically non-viable. Rights in such societies are more likely to centre on the extended family, the community and the tribe and the rights of the individual are not perceived as paramount. For most Afghans, human rights, as understood by people in the west, remain a distant and abstract notion. At the same time, it is hypocritical of the west to preach human rights for Afghanistan when the US has so flagrantly breached them in its treatment of individual prisoners at Bagram and other military prisons in Afghanistan (see Chapter 6 on outlaws and warlords), not to mention the unarmed civilians, including women and children, killed by US bombing in Bibi Mahru, Kili Sarnad, Lashkargah and Takhta-Pul, for example, during Operation Enduring Freedom. In May 2006 further coalition bombing resulted in the death of over 30 civilians in Azizi village to the west of Qandahar, an action unlikely to convert many Afghan villagers to western ideas about what constitutes human rights.
Another cultural event that symbolised the ideological struggle for Afghanistan's heart and mind was the entry of Vidsa Samadzai as Miss Afghanistan in the Miss Earth beauty pageant held in Manila in November 2003. Her onstage appearance in a bright red bikini caused outrage in Afghanistan and prompted the Minister of Women's Affairs to denounce Samadzai's actions as 'lascivious' and 'not representing Afghan women'. A member of the Supreme Court in Kabul stated that her appearance in a bikini was completely unacceptable and unlawful in Islam, and the Afghan government, through its embassy in Washington, lost no time in publicly stating that her appearance in the pageant had not been authorised by them. Fears were expressed that Vidsa could have unwittingly undermined the cause of women's emancipation in Afghanistan as well as endorsing widespread perceptions of the moral corruption and excessive freedoms of western democracy. In a country where most social events and celebrations are segregated by gender, all post-primary schools are single sex, the majority of marriages are arranged and women are still in purdah and shrouded from men who are not close relatives, this is hardly surprising.
MEDIA WARS
A further example of this ideological struggle is the ongoing media war, where new innovative TV stations show programmes denounced by the more conservative members of the community, along with government officials. The Kabul-based TV station Tolo has been at the cutting edge by presenting MTV-style music shows, fashion shows and western films, with young male and female presenters working together on-screen. Tolo is rightly proud of its investigative journalism and has covered hitherto taboo news topics such as paedophilia, the power of warlords, illegal logging and corruption in government. In March 2005, Afghanistan's Ulema shura criticised Tolo and other TV stations for showing inappropriate programmes 'opposed to Islam and national values'. Two months later a young female presenter, Shaima Rezayee, who had been forced to resign from her job at Tolo under pressure from clerics, was gunned down in Kabul, a real-life victim of the country's culture wars. A young male presenter, Shakeb Isaar, also received death threats from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and Chief Justice Fazl-e Hadi Shinwari, branded him 'a corrupter of youth'. One of the founders of the programme, Mohammad Mohseni, made the following point: 'Look at the demographics of this country, it has one of the youngest populations in the world. The old conservatives fear becoming irrelevant. A few years down the line and they will have lost most of their power.' This remains to be seen, a new generation of conservatives may well replace the old.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Drugs in Afghanistan"
by .
Copyright © 2007 David MacDonald.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
MapList of abbreviations
Glossary of terms
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1. Introduction
2. Scorpion tales
3. A nation in anguish
4. Opium cultivators
5. Heroin producers and traffickers
6. Outlaws and warlords
7. Drug use in Afghanistan’s history
8. Neighbours and refugees
9. A tale of two opiums
10. Hashish and hakims
11. Pharmaceuticals and chemical cocktails
12. Masters of the universe: other drugs and future dimensions
13. Scorpion tails
Postscript
Notes
Index