Afeganistão: a guerra do ópio As notícias que nos vão chegando do Afeganistão não dão para perceber bem o que lá se passa.Sabemos que se encontra instalada nesse País uma força multinacional, cumprindo um mandato das Nações Unidas e também da NATO para manter a paz e a ordem como forma de prevenção contra ataques terroristas, da qual faz parte um contingente militar português de cerca de duas centenas de membros.Também sabemos que a defesa da paz e da ordem neste caso significam a luta contra um inimigo estranho, os Taliban, com ligações conhecidas à Al Qaeda.Os Taliban dominaram aquele País desde o fim da ocupação soviética (1996) até 2001/2, tendo praticado uma política que não poucas vezes chocou o Ocidente por decisões que atentavam contra elementares valores civilizacionais - tais como a destruição de monumentos históricos e a execução pública de mulheres como forma de punição pela prática de adultério.Por isso (embora não apenas) a campanha militar no Afeganistão é vista no Ocidente como necessária, em contraste, por exemplo, com a que decorre no Iraque.No entanto, sabemos pouco do que se passa no Afeganistão, para além das notícias que de quando em vez – mais nos últimos meses, infelizmente – dão conta da morte de soldados da força internacional e de cidadãos afegãos apanhados em acções militares.Para melhor perceber o que se passa no Afeganistão, bem como a missão da força multinacional, recomendo aos “clientes” do 4R a leitura de uma magnífica reportagem publicada na revista New Yorker, da semana 9-16 de Julho, intitulada “The Taliban’s opium war”.Dessa reportagem se retira a noção da extrema dificuldade da missão da força multinacional para conseguir uma solução estável e duradoura para o País.A economia do Afeganistão depende muito da produção do ópio (base da produção da heroína), que representa mais de 50% do PIB do País.O regime dos Taliban tinha proibido a produção de ópio, impondo penas severas aos prevaricadores, não raro a pena de morte. Talvez essa tenha sido uma das razões da facilidade com que foram derrotados pela força anglo-americana em 2001/2002.Desde então a produção de ópio aumentou significativamente, existindo actualmente perto de 200.000 hectares dedicados ao cultivo da planta.O problema é que a força multinacional pretende também acabar com esta produção, para o que foi criada uma Afghan Eradication Force (AEF) que, juntamente com elementos americanos especializados tem vindo a destruir plantações como forma de dissuasão.Os Taliban, esquecendo as suas convicções religiosas, oferecem agora protecção aos produtores e negociantes da droga, em troca do pagamento de um imposto do ópio – o negócio é bom para ambas as partes.Acresce que muitos protegidos do regime de Cabul beneficiam da complacência do Governo/ força multinacional para manterem a produção de ópio, criando dificuldades à acção da AEF.Um puzzle estranho, que torna muito incerto o futuro do País e também o cumprimento dos objectivos da força multinacional. in Quarta República
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Caro Tavares Moreira, boa tarde!
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Antes de mais, agradeço-lhe a indicação do artigo do New Yorker, que já li, e é tão interessante quanto intrigante, como, aliás, o meu Amigo refere.
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O problema da droga, que felizmente nunca me bateu à porta, mas ninguém está livre de surpresas, é daqueles que, de vez em quando me ocorrem quando tento perceber algumas contradições da economia.
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Os relatórios da ONU vêm dando conta da dimensão e da evolução do negócio a nível mundial. Fiquei verdadeiramente surpreendido quando li, no relatório do PNUD 2000, que "O comércio ilegal de droga, em 1995, foi estimado em 400 mil milhões de dólares, cerca de 8% do comércio mundial, mais do que a parcela de ferro e aço ou de veículos motorizados e aproximadamente o mesmo que a dos têxteis (7,5%) e do gás e petróleo (8,6%).
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Desde então o negócio não deve ter perdido a sua importância relativa, ainda segundo os relatórios especializados da ONU.Um dia ocorreu-me começar a colocar aos meus amigos, se a ocasião se propiciava, a seguinte questão: Se te fosse dada uma varinha mágica que, de um momento para o outro, terminasse com o consumo de droga, o que farias?A pergunta, à primeira vista, é bizarra e nem sequer sei se é original. A mim nunca me tinha sido colocada.
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Os meus amigos, geralmente, acabam por concordar que talvez deixassem a vara mágica de lado até estudarem melhor o assunto.
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Este seu "post" só contribui, perdoe-me a imodéstia, para reforçar a pertinência daquilo que nas minhas palavras cruzadas tenho escrito sob a interrogação:E SE, DE REPENTE, ACABASSE A DROGA?
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Quanto à presença de tropas portuguesas no Afeganistão é matéria que suscita (deveria suscitar) algum debate político que, ao que parece, os principais partidos evitam.É matéria que se inclui num desafio que coloquei ao Pinho Cardão aí no "post" em baixo.
While destroying a field of opium poppies in Uruzgan Province, members of the Afghan Eradication Force came under fire in an ambush apparently orchestrated by the Taliban. Photograph by Aaron Huey.
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In the main square in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan Province, in central Afghanistan, a large billboard shows a human skeleton being hanged. The rope is not a normal gallows rope but the stem of an opium poppy. Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.
In the main square in Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan Province, in central Afghanistan, a large billboard shows a human skeleton being hanged. The rope is not a normal gallows rope but the stem of an opium poppy. Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.
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About ten thousand people live in the town. The men are bearded and wear traditional robes and tunics and cover their heads with turbans or sequinned skullcaps. There are virtually no women in sight, and when they do appear they wear all-concealing burkas. A few paved streets join at a traffic circle in the center of town, but within a few blocks they peter out to dirt tracks.
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Almost everything around Tirin Kot is some shade of brown. The river is a khaki-colored wash of silt and snowmelt that flows out of the mountain range to the north, past mud-walled family compounds. On either side of the river, however, running down the valley, there is a narrow strip of wheat fields and poppy fields, and for several weeks in the spring the poppies bloom: lovely, open-petalled white, pink, red, and magenta blossoms, the darker colors indicating the ones with the most opium.
Almost everything around Tirin Kot is some shade of brown. The river is a khaki-colored wash of silt and snowmelt that flows out of the mountain range to the north, past mud-walled family compounds. On either side of the river, however, running down the valley, there is a narrow strip of wheat fields and poppy fields, and for several weeks in the spring the poppies bloom: lovely, open-petalled white, pink, red, and magenta blossoms, the darker colors indicating the ones with the most opium.
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One afternoon this spring, at the height of the harvest, I drove through the area with Douglas Wankel, a former Drug Enforcement Administration official who was hired by the United States government in 2003 to organize its counter-narcotics effort here. Wankel, who is sixty-one and has piercing blue eyes, was stationed in Kabul as a young D.E.A. official in 1978 and 1979, during the bloody unrest that led up to the Soviet invasion. “I left on a flight to New Delhi a couple of hours before the Soviets rolled in,” he said. “People thought it was because I knew it was coming. I didn’t; I just happened to be leaving on a trip. But the Soviets branded me a C.I.A. agent, and so I couldn’t come back—until now, that is.”
One afternoon this spring, at the height of the harvest, I drove through the area with Douglas Wankel, a former Drug Enforcement Administration official who was hired by the United States government in 2003 to organize its counter-narcotics effort here. Wankel, who is sixty-one and has piercing blue eyes, was stationed in Kabul as a young D.E.A. official in 1978 and 1979, during the bloody unrest that led up to the Soviet invasion. “I left on a flight to New Delhi a couple of hours before the Soviets rolled in,” he said. “People thought it was because I knew it was coming. I didn’t; I just happened to be leaving on a trip. But the Soviets branded me a C.I.A. agent, and so I couldn’t come back—until now, that is.”
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Working first with the D.E.A. and then with the State Department, Wankel helped create the Afghan Eradication Force, with troops of the Afghan National Police drawn from the Ministry of the Interior. Last year, an estimated four hundred thousand acres of opium poppies were planted in Afghanistan, a fifty-nine-per-cent increase over the previous year. Afghanistan now supplies more than ninety-two per cent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. More than half the country’s annual G.D.P., some $3.1 billion, is believed to come from the drug trade, and narcotics officials believe that part of the money is funding the Taliban insurgency.
Working first with the D.E.A. and then with the State Department, Wankel helped create the Afghan Eradication Force, with troops of the Afghan National Police drawn from the Ministry of the Interior. Last year, an estimated four hundred thousand acres of opium poppies were planted in Afghanistan, a fifty-nine-per-cent increase over the previous year. Afghanistan now supplies more than ninety-two per cent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. More than half the country’s annual G.D.P., some $3.1 billion, is believed to come from the drug trade, and narcotics officials believe that part of the money is funding the Taliban insurgency.
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Wankel was in Uruzgan to oversee a poppy-eradication campaign—the first major effort to disrupt the harvest in the province. He had brought with him a two-hundred-and-fifty-man A.E.F. contingent, including forty-odd contractors supplied by DynCorp, a Virginia-based private military company, which has a number of large U.S. government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world. In Colombia, DynCorp helps implement the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca. The A.E.F.’s armed convoy had taken three days to drive from Kabul, and had set up a base on a plateau above a deep wadi. With open land all around, it was a good spot to ward off attacks.
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Much of Uruzgan is classified by the United Nations as “Extreme Risk / Hostile Environment.” The Taliban effectively controls four-fifths of the province, which, like the movement, is primarily Pashtun. Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, was born and raised here, as were three other founders of the movement. The Taliban’s seizure of Tirin Kot, in the mid-nineties, was a key stepping stone in their march to Kabul, and their loss of the town in 2001 was a decisive moment in their fall. The Taliban have made a concerted comeback in the past two years; they are the de-facto authority in much of the Pashtun south and east, and have recently spread their violence to parts of the north as well. The debilitating and corrupting effects of the opium trade on the government of President Hamid Karzai is a significant factor in the Taliban’s revival.
Wankel was in Uruzgan to oversee a poppy-eradication campaign—the first major effort to disrupt the harvest in the province. He had brought with him a two-hundred-and-fifty-man A.E.F. contingent, including forty-odd contractors supplied by DynCorp, a Virginia-based private military company, which has a number of large U.S. government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world. In Colombia, DynCorp helps implement the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca. The A.E.F.’s armed convoy had taken three days to drive from Kabul, and had set up a base on a plateau above a deep wadi. With open land all around, it was a good spot to ward off attacks.
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Much of Uruzgan is classified by the United Nations as “Extreme Risk / Hostile Environment.” The Taliban effectively controls four-fifths of the province, which, like the movement, is primarily Pashtun. Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, was born and raised here, as were three other founders of the movement. The Taliban’s seizure of Tirin Kot, in the mid-nineties, was a key stepping stone in their march to Kabul, and their loss of the town in 2001 was a decisive moment in their fall. The Taliban have made a concerted comeback in the past two years; they are the de-facto authority in much of the Pashtun south and east, and have recently spread their violence to parts of the north as well. The debilitating and corrupting effects of the opium trade on the government of President Hamid Karzai is a significant factor in the Taliban’s revival.
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The Taliban instituted a strict Islamist policy against the opium trade during the final years of their regime, and by the time of their overthrow they had virtually eliminated it. But now, Lieutenant General Mohammad Daud-Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of the interior for counter-narcotics, told me, “there has been a coalition between the Taliban and the opium smugglers. This year, they have set up a commission to tax the harvest.” In return, he said, the Taliban had offered opium farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The switch in strategy has an obvious logic: it provides opium money for the Taliban to sustain itself and helps it to win over the farming communities.
The Taliban instituted a strict Islamist policy against the opium trade during the final years of their regime, and by the time of their overthrow they had virtually eliminated it. But now, Lieutenant General Mohammad Daud-Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of the interior for counter-narcotics, told me, “there has been a coalition between the Taliban and the opium smugglers. This year, they have set up a commission to tax the harvest.” In return, he said, the Taliban had offered opium farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The switch in strategy has an obvious logic: it provides opium money for the Taliban to sustain itself and helps it to win over the farming communities.
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Wankel had flown in from Kabul five days earlier to meet with the governor of Uruzgan, Abdul Hakim Munib, about the eradication operation, only to discover that Munib had left for Kabul the day before. Wankel was told that a sister of the governor had died or fallen ill—there were several versions—but nobody believed this was the real reason for his absence. Munib, a former Taliban deputy minister, was suspected of retaining ties to the movement. And, Wankel noted, there were poppy fields within sight of Munib’s palace.
“We’re not able to destroy all the poppy—that’s not the point. What we’re trying to do is lend an element of threat and risk to the farmers’ calculations, so they won’t plant next year,” Wankel said later. “It’s like robbing a bank. If people see there’s more to be had by robbing a bank than by working in one, they’re going to rob it, until they learn there’s a price to pay.”
Wankel had flown in from Kabul five days earlier to meet with the governor of Uruzgan, Abdul Hakim Munib, about the eradication operation, only to discover that Munib had left for Kabul the day before. Wankel was told that a sister of the governor had died or fallen ill—there were several versions—but nobody believed this was the real reason for his absence. Munib, a former Taliban deputy minister, was suspected of retaining ties to the movement. And, Wankel noted, there were poppy fields within sight of Munib’s palace.
“We’re not able to destroy all the poppy—that’s not the point. What we’re trying to do is lend an element of threat and risk to the farmers’ calculations, so they won’t plant next year,” Wankel said later. “It’s like robbing a bank. If people see there’s more to be had by robbing a bank than by working in one, they’re going to rob it, until they learn there’s a price to pay.”
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