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Drug Trade Complicates U.S. Task in Marjah

The impetus for the U.S.-led assault on Marjah began one moonless night last May when a squad of American and Afghan anti-narcotics agents, backed by U.S. Marines, slipped through the town's empty streets and raided the Lachoya opium bazaar.

Crashing open shutters, they found shop after shop stacked to the ceiling with bundles of opium, heroin, hashish, guns and improvised explosive devices used in roadside bombings. "If anybody needed proof that there was a nexus between the Taliban and drug traffickers, this was it," says a Western counter-narcotics agent in Kabul. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' offensive in Afghanistan.)

Marjah was at the center of a dozen international drug networks reaching as far as Europe, Russia and the Far East. When the haul was later tallied — 18 tons of opium, 1 ton of hashish, and 46 kilos of pure, crystal heroin — it was probably the largest drug seizure on record, anywhere.

Not surprisingly, the raid displeased the town's drug lords and their Taliban protectors. They rushed to Lachoy bazaar and kept the U.S. and Afghan drug force pinned down under fire for four days, say counter-narcotics agents in Kabul.

Unlike that raid, NATO's 15,000-troop assault on the town last month was no secret. Alliance commanders had broadcast news of the planned attack to give civilians time to get out of the way. The drawback of the U.S. and its allies telegraphing their intentions was predictable: Three months ago, locals told TIME, every drug trafficker dismantled his labs, grabbed what remained of his stash, and slipped away. "We knew this was going to happen," griped one drug expert. "To catch these guys, you need the element of surprise." (See pictures of British soldiers in Afghanistan.)

Having captured the town, NATO and Afghan officials face a quandary that, if mishandled, could jeopardize the operation's goal of turning Marjah's people against the Taliban. Local farmers are just a month away from harvesting the area's primary crop, opium poppy. Playing by the rules, the crop should be destroyed, but such an action could swiftly turn the local population against the Western alliance, and the "government in a box" they brought to Marjah. Says one farmer, Mohammd Rahim Khan, "I spent lots of money on my field and so did my neighbors. If the government officials destroy the fields, nearly all the people will rise against them." That's why, according to highly placed Afghan officials, U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal opposes wiping out this particular poppy harvest. (See pictures of Person of the Year 2009 runner-up General Stanley McChrystal.)

McChrystal is expected to win the argument. Concedes one western drug expert in Kabul, "We just can't go in and burn down their fields."

But some Western counter-narcotics officials in Afghanistan would like to do precisely that, offering the Marjah farmers payment for the loss of their opium poppy crop. But as one drug expert complains, "You'd be rewarding criminality." He adds: "These people knew about the offensive and they planted the crop anyway. They wanted to make a profit."

These counter-narcotics officials point out that other swathes of eastern Afghanistan have been cleared of opium poppy without igniting revolt. They also argue that if the poppy is allowed to ripen, wily drug traffickers will find ways of harvesting it even if Marjah is ringed by 5,000 Marines. Says Gretchen Peters, author and expert on Taliban drug ties with traffickers: ""Counter-narcotics, just like counterinsurgency, is like playing the arcane game of whack-a-mole. You knock it out in one place and it pops up somewhere else."

Marjah's poppy planters, for their part, insist they had no choice but to plant. The Taliban, some say, told them to grow the crop to fund the insurgency. But farmer Khan disagrees. "Nobody forced us," he insists. It's simple economics: Opium pays far better than the wheat and grapes that Marjah's farmers used to grow. The same goes for the Taliban, of course. According to U.N. experts, the insurgents last year reaped nearly $300 million from the drug trade, though Afghan officials put the figure far lower, at between $80-100 million. (Watch TIME's video "The Challenge on the Ground in Afghanistan.)

"Even if it's 'only' $80 million, that's still enough to fuel the insurgency for a year," says one counter-narcotics agent. And nearly all of the Taliban's drug profits came from Helmand province, and from Marjah in particular, an area experts say is probably the world's biggest illegal producer of opium poppies.

The local drug lords make themselves inconspicuous in the town. Marjah has no gaudy narco-mansions — Afghan drug lords build their palaces, and bank their money, in Dubai — and there are none of the vicious turf wars that characterize the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. "There's enough to go around for everybody," says one Western drug agent who visited Marjah.

In Marjah, Taliban commanders had a hand in every facet of drug operations, according to agents. They collected a tithe from farmers (as do corrupt government officials in other areas); at harvest time, Taliban fighters put down their AK-47s and help in the poppy fields; they guard heroin labs and ride shotgun on smugglers' convoys across trackless deserts into Pakistan and Iran. Says Gen. Daoud Daoud, the Interior Ministry's chief of Counter-Narcotics, "The Taliban are involved in international networks, along with Iranians, Pakistanis, Tajiks and Germans."

Having decided to flee ahead of NATO's arrival in town, some of the traffickers — locals and drug experts believe— fled south to Pakistan's empty Baluchistan desert, while others are holed up in the nearby mountains of Musa Qala and the rest de-camped to Nimruz province, along a major smuggling route.

Fresh challenges await McChrystal's plans to bring good governance to Marjah. The drug traffickers can still flash around large wads of cash, and it may be difficult for some Afghan officials, newly arrived in town with their slender wage packets, to resist a bribe. Farmer Khan has noticed that in the past, "when there is no Taliban, the government men are taking money from the smugglers to help them move drugs across the border."

Some locals fear an upsurge in confrontation in the weeks ahead. Says Shaistah Gul, "When the trees and fields get greener and bigger, the Taliban will show themselves again, and the Americans will start their raids. It will be hard for us."

With reporting by Muhib Habibi/Kandahar.

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