The Hidden War of Opium Brides, Addicts & Warlords
A sinister maze lies beneath the wreckage left
by a litany of wars that has plagued Afghanistan since 1978 – the Soviet
invasion and struggle with the mujahideen fighters that lasted until 1989,
followed by the years of civil war between various mujahideen groups and
political factions including the emerging Taliban until 1996, and then the 5-year
rule of the Taliban from 1996-2001 to the unending 17 year-long war that the
Americans have waged and continue to fight in Afghanistan in their hopes to topple
the Taliban and quash their ever-proliferating terrorist cells. It is the longest-running
war the Americans have ever engaged in. But long after the sounds of gunfire and smell of smoke
have dissipated, it is the lucrative network
of drug-trafficking and opium-generating business that lives on (and kills on)… This illicit
economy has on many occasions helped to fund the war for its various parties,
enemies, and allies involved (whatever we like to call them). As frustrating as
it sounds, every meddler in this unending multi-faceted conflict has had one
common thread interweaved in their shady patchwork: that is (you guessed it)
the notorious opium trade. Whether they are the Russians, the fractious Afghan
mujahideen, the Afghan Communists, the Americans, the various Islamist groups
inside and outside Afghanistan, the Taliban, the Pakistanis, the Iranians, and
God knows who else, they have all had a grimy hand in it.
Fariba Fawa, the author of Opium Nation, reports that as the drugs
travel across every border beyond Afghanistan, its price increases. A kilo of
heroin, a processed extract of opium that sells for $3,000 in Afghanistan, can
finally sell for more than $50,000 when it enters the United States. It should
make one shudder in disbelief and simmering anger that one of the toughest
demons to drive out remains the same one all over the world that ravishes and
robs the life out of those who succumb to the bane of drugs like heroin. The
thing that makes you even more grieved and angry at the same time is that the
majority of these addicts and relatives of addicts are most likely unwilling
slaves sold to this sly devourer. They are mothers who lose their sons or
husbands to the narcotic; they are sisters who are sold as opium brides to pay
for the debts of their brothers or fathers; they are children born addicted to
the drug because their mother was forced into taking it; they are husbands and
uncles who get involved in the business because they have no other form of
employment. Then there are those who offer and trade it, raising and lowering
prices to alter and create demand for it where and when it profits them, making
sure the right (vulnerable) populations are enticed by it or forced into
producing it for lack of any other options.
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| An Afghan girl forced to marry at the age of thirteen. [Afghan Women's Writing Project, Stephanie Sinclair] |
In the case of Afghanistan, the years of
war coupled with the wrong kind of agricultural aid projects advocated in the
1950s that eroded Afghan soil, left only a few crops that were possible for
farming. It included poppy, the most gainful crop of them all. It was in the
1980s that poppy farming spread across Afghanistan – in the Nangarhar,
Badakhshan and Balkh provinces – and which led to the processing of opium into
heroin and its trafficking all through the 1990s, firstly by the mujahideen and
afterwards the Taliban. The Soviets and Americans all knowingly profited from
this and allowed for various faces of the opium network to operate, for their
own reasons and gains. When the Russians left, the mujahideen groups and later the
Taliban carried on reaping the ongoing profits.
I have driven past a street in Kabul that
is infamous for its heroin addicts – young and old men wasting away their
lives, enslaved to a drug they cannot live (or die) without. This is the invisible
war of Afghanistan, the unseen battle that demolishes families and communities
from the inside out. The economy of opium in Afghanistan continues to flourish
as a product of all the wars that fueled its ‘productive’ existence. Drugs
always seem to flourish in lawless lands. According to the United Nations
Survey, way back in 1932, opium production was growing around the 75-tonne
figure, but by 2017, it has exploded many times over to more than 9,000 tons.
It is an increase of 87% from the 2016 level of 4,800 tons. [Afghanistan Opium
Survey 2017, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime]
An estimated fifteen million addicts around
the world are supplied with Afghan opium and the drug kills one hundred
thousand people a year. Approximately 6.4 percent of the country’s population
is engaged in the drug trafficking chain. The global trade in Afghan opiates is
annually worth an estimated 65 billion
dollars. One’s mind is no doubt seared by such statistics, because we cannot
even begin to comprehend the human tragedy and untold casualties that play out
behind the tidy round-up figures. Whether or not you believe that the devil is
real, these numbers paint a seemingly hopeless scenario that should make one
wonder… if the devil is real, he’s a smart villain who gets greedy, misled,
deceived humans focused on petty things like money, fame, religion, politics,
and wars, so that he can do his real work through these corrupted systemic
structures that incubate vices and addictions which destroy far many more
people in the long term than guns and bombs will in split seconds.
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| An opium farmer in Helmand province harvesting opium sap with his sons. [Noor Mohammad, AFP] |
Some people will call me a religious
person, but I simply see myself as a created soul who has encountered the
presence, love and truth of God through the lived message of Jesus. He has
defined specific moments of my life that I can recount in detail and that I continually
experience in the daily grind of ordinary living. Therefore, to live by his
words and his spirit is not a religious thing for me, but a
spiritual-physical-supernatural life of relationship and interaction that
involves all my heart, mind, body and spirit. In the tangible, and the
spiritual. In the seen and the invisible. God is not up there in the clouds. He
sits and suffers with us, as in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
That is the hope I have experienced, and tangibly felt – so much so that it
does not clash with logic, but rather logic complements it; so much so that it
is not a religious obligation, but a joy of knowing Him and making Him known by
loving my fellow man as He loves him.
I see in the opium trade all the ugliness
of man’s depravity, a lost humanity devoid of the true experiential knowledge
and love of God in his heart. Suffering and evil does not make me rail against
Him, rather it makes me run to Him, because He gives me strength to love the
addict and the warlord, to seek justice, to pray and work and act for their
freedom and repentance (the word simply means to “turn around”, to “express in
intensive force”). In recognizing man’s depravity, we can see the real possibility
for the goodness that he was made to embody and the promise of restoration. In
his depravity, without the love of God and man, he destroys others by his
greed; he allows evil and the enemy of our souls to invade his home, his
society; he thinks he has free will, but really, he has become a slave to
something he cannot master. He does not know the words of Jesus, who said, “The
devil comes to steal, kill and destroy; but I have come that they may have
life, and life abundantly.” He doesn’t know the two greatest commandments that
Jesus lived and shared, “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength;
and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” He has not yet comprehended the
power of Jesus’ message of forgiveness and peace-making through self-sacrifice:
to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” and to be
“peacemakers, for you will be called sons of God”.
I write all of this with utmost conviction.
To my dear reader: in order to see the transformation and redemption of a
person, a family, a community, a tribe, a society, a nation, we must realize
not only the wrongs that others have committed against us, but the wrongs that
we have committed against others. We must realize how love has often left our
hearts, and we have been selfish to the core. We must realize where we have
gone wrong, as individuals, and as a collective. We must weep for all the times
we were silent about an injustice we should have spoken up about. We must
understand that evils such as the world’s opium trade, its bloody conflicts,
the endless cycles of political strife and corruption, the sexual perversion,
the crimes against humanity, the genocides and racial wars, are all merely
revealing consequences of a deeper root issue.
That is, our rebellion against the Truth,
our hatred against Love, our refusal to live by the way of self-giving sacrifice,
our orphan spirit and false identities, our shame and self-righteousness apart
from the grace of God… I can go on, but if you look past the masks that every
person wears, whether they are born into circumstances that make them rich or
poor, clean or dirty, educated or illiterate; whether they are politician or
pauper, warlord or addict, orphan or prince, factory worker or businessman; you
will see the same lost child in each one, and an unspoken desire for forgiveness,
wholeness, and redemption.
The hidden war is the one that is waged for
our very souls. When we start there, we will soon be able to make the external changes
by way of education, policy, law, medicine, technology, arts, government, business
and whatever spheres of influence we were uniquely created to impact. There’s
that story about the man who wanted to ask God, “Why aren’t you doing anything
about the suffering and evil in the world?” But he was afraid that if he did,
God would ask the same question of him.
The greatest defeat is to be ignorant of
the real battle. To win it is to be set free from the tyranny of dictators,
religious extremism, political ideologies, human philosophies, temporary
pleasures, you name it all. To be liberated is to overcome fear, disgrace, and
hatred with Love. To encounter Love is to know our Creator in the very present
moment, and to know and feel that He knows us by name. Knowing Him – not just following
religion or what other people tell you – is the very power that enables us to
love those who hurt us, to care for those who cannot repay us, to do as He did,
and as He does.
[Cover photo: Opium farmers in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Photography by Ayaz Gul.]
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