How heroin travels from Afghanistan to Tajikistan

Editor's note: Last month GlobalPost Moscow correspondent Miriam Elder traveled in Tajikistan investigating growing instability in the former Soviet satellite. Below, she reports on Tajikistan's porous border with Afghanistan. In another report, she investigates growing violence involving mysterious outsiders. 

AFGHAN BORDER, Tajikistan — The rocky peaks of Afghanistan stretch for 800 miles along Tajikistan’s winding southern border.

At night, a smattering of bare white lights marks a village nestled in the foothills. During the day, a bright sun illuminates the red mountains and the serpentine river that separates one of the world’s most unstable countries from one of the world’s poorest.

Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan is half the length of its border with Pakistan, and no less porous. Yet rather than providing passage for insurgents and weapons, this border has won a different sort of notoriety — as a main corridor for Afghan heroin.

It’s not hard to see why.

In theory, the Tajik government pours effort into policing its Afghan border. In theory, a traveler requires special government permission to travel to it, or within 12 miles of it. In theory, you will be turned back if you don’t have that special stamp.

In practice, the situation couldn’t be more different. Riding along 90 miles of unpaved road during a full day’s travel, a recent visitor encountered three military checkpoints, each armed by several soldiers and a member of the country’s KGB security service. After a quick document check, the car was quickly waved through at each point. The total amount of bribes paid: $9 plus, at one checkpoint, a tank of gas.

Tajikistan ranks as one of the world’s poorest countries, a largely rural nation where clean water, heat and electricity are, more often than not, a luxury. About half of Tajiks live at or below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.

That doesn’t exclude its troops or border guards, largely draftees.

Tajikistan took full control of its southern border in 2005, after requesting the pullout of Russian troops amid a post-Soviet drive for total sovereignty that was delayed by the bloody civil war it fought in the mid-1990s.

Today, the number of guards it has policing the border is, like so much in the country, a state secret. “We have as many as are needed to guard the border,” said Khushnud Rakhmatullayev, spokesman for the Tajik border guard service.

Many experts, as well as outspoken officials in Russia, fear that isn’t the case.

According to the United Nations, Afghanistan has produced about 3,600 tons of opium this year, composing about 90 percent of the global total. A large bulk of that goes through Tajikistan. Yet last year, Tajik security services seized just over 4.5 tons of drugs, and are on track for a similar total this year.

Last year, the United States gifted $35.77 million in foreign assistance to Tajikistan, with the biggest amount, $7.53 million, going to “peace and security” operations, according to the State Department. That included sending six Tajik soldiers to take military courses in the United States and aid for the reconstruction of border outposts.

According to the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, America sent a total of $58.65 million in foreign aid in 2009, with an increase of more than 11 percent, to $65.48 million, slated for 2010.

“We’ve known this has been a major issue since 2005 and since then have devoted significant resources to increasing their capacity,” said Damian Wampler, information officer for the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, referring to the porousness of the border.

Tajikistan could use the help. The country produces little beyond negligible amounts of hydroelectric power, coal and aluminum, and around half of its GDP comes from remittances sent by migrant workers in Russia.

The border posts that line the 90 miles of border that this reporter saw were little more than wooden watchtowers, set up along the roughest stretches of river where crossing might well be impossible, while long, calm stretches were left entirely unmanned. I saw four foot patrols, all at night and all in villages, ignoring the lengths of unpopulated mountainside and riverside.

Beyond that, widespread corruption aids the drug trade. In a recently released report, Transparency International ranked Tajikistan 154th most corrupt of the world’s countries.

When it comes to that, however, the United States remains silent. “It’s the responsibility of the government of Tajikistan to do that,” Wampler said, referring to cracking down on the country’s narcomafia. “We’re working with them to help them do that, but we can only do so much.”

“The goal is to create the capacity within the lower levels of the Tajik government so they can fight the mafia, basically,” he said. “The overall goal is for Tajik government to do it.”

Yet there are signs that tactics are changing in going after Afghanistan’s flourishing drug trade.

Last month, Russian and U.S. officials announced a joint raid on four heroin laboratories in Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, marking the first time Russians took part in an operation on Afghan territory since withdrawing from the country after its failed war in 1989.

Some 70 troops — coalition forces and Afghan troops — aided by four officers from Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service swooped onto the site, accompanied by helicopter gunships, to destroy the labs, including 932 kilograms of heroin and 156 kilograms of raw opium worth about $4 billion on the global market.

“It’s a great success,” Federal Drug Control Service chief Viktor Ivanov told a Moscow press conference. “If we had waited any longer, the heroin would have crossed Afghan borders.”

Russia has long been urging the United States to crack down on Afghan heroin production. According to the country’s chief doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, Russians spend $17 billion annually on drugs that come mainly from Afghanistan. The drug control service says 550,000 addicts are officially registered in the country, while independent estimates put the real number at several times that.

“If there is no opium produced in Afghanistan, there will be no trafficking,” Ivanov said. He cited the following figure with dismay: While 230,000 hectares of coca-farming land are destroyed annually in Colombia, just 2,000 hectares of opium-growing land are destroyed on average in Afghanistan. “That’s 100 times less,” he said.

The United States, meanwhile, insists it is taking the problem seriously. “We view it as a threat to our national security and to that of our friends and partners,” Eric Rubin, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said at the press conference with Ivanov.

“We have spent many billions of dollars trying to eradicate opium in Afghanistan. What is new is we are trying a new approach,” he said. Both Ivanov and Rubin said the joint operation would not be the last.

As violence in Tajikistan grows to heights not seen since the mid-1990s, officials here have remained silent on how the drug trade inextricably links the country to its troubled southern neighbor.

It was left to Ivanov, Russia’s drug tsar, to make the connection. “We see that where drugs transit, criminal groups transit, growing a society of organized crime, which leads to the creation of cartels,” he said, comparing the worsening situation in Tajikistan to the U.S.-Mexico border. “The problem is not getting better, but getting worse — not just in Afghanistan, but all over Central Asia,” he warned.

Read the first part of this series, in which the author investigates growing violence involving mysterious outsiders. 

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct Wampler's title.