Inside the Afghan drug trade
In a northern province, four law-enforcement officials describe life built around trafficking.
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In any case, Bilal says his relations with the drug smugglers was never very warm. "I don't know why, but the smugglers did not trust us," says Bilal.
He thinks for a moment, and then continues. One of his colleagues in the police department in the border town, "was playing games with the smugglers. [This commander] is the kind of person who cut a deal with smugglers, takes money from them, and further on up the road, stops and seizes their drugs, too. That was the reason the smugglers did not trust us. "
Bilal says almost all the police commanders in Takhar have paid officials at the Ministry of Interior to get their jobs, and nowadays, commanders have to pay increasing amounts just to keep their jobs.
"Every three months the commanders are pushed a little bit or they are told that they may be replaced. Then everybody rushes toward the ministry with $10,000."
But Bilal says he likes his job. It's not the responsibilities that he likes the most, though. It's the access to the drug trade. "It is a good position," he says. "I pay $1,000 and get $20,000 in profit."
"It has some advantages," he says.
Top Afghan officials privately admit that perhaps 80 percent of the personnel at the Ministry of Interior, Afghanistan's chief law-enforcement agency – from local police chiefs up to the top bureaucrats – may be benefiting from the drug trade. At a press conference announcing his resignation last fall, Interior Minister Ali Jalali said that the ministry had a list of 100 top officials who were being watched for evidence of drug trafficking. The result is a government that is either incapable or unwilling to prevent a trade that is rapidly undermining the country's rule of law and the Afghan people's faith in their leadership.
"The wrong elements can be a sapling in our society, and if we act now, we can remove it with less damage," says Habibullah Qaderi, Afghan minister for counternarcotics, a government agency that is separate from the Ministry of Interior. "But if it becomes a tree, there will be more destruction when you remove it."
Already the corrupt sapling is becoming a tree, Mr. Qaderi says, adding that Afghanistan cannot afford to wait for the proof of guilt. "If we had removed these people one by one, the country would have been much much better." The Afghan people need to trust that their government is working in the national interest. "People have to be close with their government. The day there is a distance, that becomes very dangerous."
The Monitor used a reporting device in this story that it normally avoids: The key interviews, all taped, were with sources who did not realize they were speaking to the press. This presents a risk to fairness and privacy, in that the interviewees might speak more casually and loosely than they would if they knew they were speaking to a reporter. We decided to go forward for several reasons. The subjects in these interviews are all public officials, not private citizens, discussing what should be public business. The issue of drug trafficking, illegal in Afghanistan as nearly everywhere else, is critically important to the future of that country and others. We could find no other safe way to collect direct evidence of this official corruption. But because we could not directly confront these police chiefs without endangering the lives of reporters or interpreters, we decided to withhold their names.
– The editors
