Heroin money could fund Kashmir's militants

Manzoor Ahmed is a very happy police chief. Just a month ago, his investigators confiscated four kilos of heroin, tucked into the back of an ordinary truck carrying apples.

But behind his proud exterior, Mr. Ahmed is worried about the dangers that narcotics are starting to pose in his little corner of this Himalayan valley.

For one thing, he knows that he can catch only a fraction of the smugglers. And he suspects that the most active narcotics smugglers are well-armed Kashmiri militants, who use narcotics as a business to pay for their violent activities, and who have a tradition of fighting to the death.

"This is pure white heroin," says Ahmed, police chief of Bandipora. "The militants get it in Pakistan, where it is cheap, about 3,000 rupees ($62) a kilo. And they smuggle it across here, give it to their sympathizers and sell down in Delhi or Bombay."

He picks up a few bags of the captured heroin and hands them to a visitor. These drugs could fetch around $210,000 on international markets, Ahmed says.

In a region where Kalashnikovs can be bought illegally for $100, Kashmir's growing narcotics trade presents a new threat to security.

Proving the link between narcotics and militant groups is difficult at best, and Indian officials admit they have yet to capture a militant in the act of smuggling.

But Indian Army officials and state police say there is no question that the cultivation of narcotics in Kashmir and transport of narcotics through the state has increased over the past decade, and that the areas where narcotics are most often found are the same areas where militants are most active.

Most worrisome, Indian officials say, is that Kashmiri militant groups may soon have enough funds from narcotics to operate independently of their former patrons, Pakistan, which has officially banned and cut all ties to the 14-year insurgency that has killed 40,000 so far.

"This is easy money for the militants, and they use it to fund their activities," says Lt. Col. Mukhtiar Singh, spokesman for the Indian Army in Srinagar. "In addition to that, foreign mercenaries use it," he says.

Indian officials admit they have no way to measure how much opium is coming into the state, since Indian police catch only those consignments they have prior information about. But since many of these heroin packs are confiscated in districts along the Pakistani cease-fire line, where opium cultivation is not common, police officials say the evidence points to the heroin being smuggled in from Pakistan.

There is another sign as well. Many of the packages captured bear the phrase "Made in Afghanistan" written in Farsi.

"It's a brand name, because the name Afghanistan sells," says a senior police official at Baramulla district headquarters. "We don't know if it actually comes from Afghanistan, but it does come from outside the state, because we catch it in areas where opium is not grown."

There is reason to believe that some Afghan heroin is coming to Kashmir, if only because instability and good rains have allowed Afghanistan to retake its position of the world's No. 1 source of opium.

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