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Beginning four years ago, a huge military offensive, first by British troops and then by United States Marines, broke the Taliban’s hold on much of the valley. At the same time, there was an all-out effort to educate farmers and encourage them to grow other crops, with the aim of cutting poppy production. The provincial governor reinforced this initiative with a tough eradication program in the land along the river.
Today, most farmers in this district, Nad Ali, as well as in nearby Marja and other settlements along the river, grow wheat and cotton. The district governor just opened a school in this remote village, and there is a small bazaar with a handful of mud-walled shops doing a steady business in gum, candy and toiletries. Patrols by NATO troops, the Afghan Army and the police are frequent.
Beyond the fertile river lands, however, a more troubling pattern is emerging. According to interviews with farmers, elders and Afghan and Western officials, the poor sharecroppers who used to farm poppy here have moved to the outer reaches of the district, turning the desert into remarkably productive opium fields. The Taliban have moved as well, evading the NATO offensive and offering the poppy farmers protection.
Over just a couple of seasons, these relocated farmers, unhampered by any military presence, have undercut the offensive’s initial gains against poppy production for this district. This, in turn, has raised hard questions about what will happen in villages like this one once the International Security Assistance Forces begin withdrawing.
“Four years ago, no one could stay here like these shopkeepers,” said an elderly man who refused to give his name, as he looked up from repairing a bicycle in the shadow of the thatch awning stretched just outside his little shop. “And when ISAF leaves, no one will be able to stay here.”
The pull of poppies is hard to resist. Despite NATO’s successes in balancing military saturation with agricultural incentives in Helmand, the province provides raw material for more than 40 percent of the world’s opium, and overall poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2011 was up 7 percent from the previous year. It is expected to rise further in the years ahead, both because opium prices are high and because the profitability of alternative crops is limited, in part by difficulties in marketing them, according to farmers and academics who study the poppy economy.
Poppy cultivation thrives on a combination of antigovernment feeling, armed insurgency and government corruption. Counternarcotics experts describe a situation in which farmers looking to make money turn to the Taliban for protection. At the same time, the farmers resent the government for what they see as its hypocrisy in simultaneously pursuing eradication, which takes away the farmers’ livelihood, and being open to corruption, which allows those farmers who pay off government officials to continue growing poppies.
In Afghanistan, the developing politics and economics of opium production make it seem as if “you are in Colombia in the early stages, in Mexico in the early years,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who heads the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.
He said that the Colombian FARC rebels started out as an ideological, antigovernment movement, which was later taken over by financial interests. He described “collusion” among Helmand’s power brokers and the Taliban, who, for a price, protect the farmers from poppy eradication by government security officials. That has added to the sense that the government has little to offer — a feeling compounded by the lack of government services like schools or clinics in poppy-growing areas.
Nad Ali elders agree that the eradication effort is fostering a bond between poppy farmers and the insurgency.
“People who are living in areas where the government has control and where they don’t allow them to grow poppies, they don’t like the ban and they are going to areas where the Taliban have control,” said an elder from Nad Ali, who asked not to be named because he feared government reprisals. “There is nothing more important for people than poppies, and there is nothing more productive for people than poppies.”
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting.
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