Province's anti-poppy effort is an Afghan success story

NANGARHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- Last year, this parched land grew more heroin-producing poppies than nearly any other place on earth. The windfall of profits reaped by local people -- estimated at $200 million -- funded a construction boom, a new car dealership, and an unprecedented whirlwind of expensive weddings and pilgrimages to Mecca.

This year, poppy cultivation dropped in this eastern province by a stunning 96 percent, largely due to the efforts of a governor and police chief who had previously been accused of tolerating the lucrative trade. The unlikely success story could hold a key to winning the larger battle against narcotics, a $2.3 billion trade that makes up the backbone of the economy here.

But UN officials worry that the province could backslide, plagued by the same pitfalls that have long characterized Western-funded campaigns against narcotics: broken promises of foreign assistance, cultural misunderstandings, and a lack of political will on the part of Afghans.

''Nangarhar has been half of a success story," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a telephone interview from Vienna. ''You have this massive reduction. But we need to maintain it."

Afghanistan is the origin of 87 percent of the world's opium and its derivative, heroin, and Nangarhar was the birthplace of the country's narcotics industry.

This year, the US government paid $40 million to set up a 500- member Afghan eradication team to destroy poppy fields across the country -- without compensating farmers. But the team began its work just as the poppy was about to be harvested. As the eradication team arrived in the southern part of the country, farmers rioted, two villagers were killed by police, and the team withdrew after destroying just 220 hectares. One hectare is equal to about 2.5 acres.

The British government, which heads the international community's antinarcotics effort in Afghanistan, has tried a different approach countrywide, but that also ended badly. In 2003, it promised to pay farmers $350 in compensation for every 2,000 square meters of poppies that authorities destroyed -- an incentive that led to a bumper crop of poppies.

Farmers contended in recent interviews that they never received the compensation owed them by the British. Haji Din Mohammad, then governor of Nangarhar, said the British government still owes about $850,000 to farmers. British antidrug officials in Kabul and London would not respond to the allegations.

Despite this difficult history, the anti-poppy effort succeeded this year in Nangarhar, the only province in the country to experience such a significant reduction.

Most attribute the success to Din Mohammad, the scion of a prominent political family with longstanding ties to the US and British governments. His family fought against the Soviet Army in the 1980s and opposed the Taliban when they came to power in 1996.

Over the years, many in Din Mohammad's family grew rich growing poppies on their vast lands. Indeed, decades of war, drought, and a lack of infrastructure have made it difficult to make money growing anything else. Poppies require little water or fertilizer, and the sale price is lucrative enough to cover the high cost of transport.

But Din Mohammad says he decided to fight against the trade when he noticed a growing number of Afghan addicts, as well as the way the country was losing the world's respect because its economy is based on drugs.

''We were the first province to grow poppies and everyone was blaming us," Din Mohammad said in a recent interview in his Kabul home.

In the past, poppy was exported to countries that turned them into narcotics, minimizing the social hazards inside Afghanistan. But since the fall of the Taliban, a large number of drug labs have opened inside the country.

In 2004, after President Hamid Karzai personally asked for his help, Din Mohammad began talking with the international community about what kind of assistance they could provide if his people stopped planting poppies.

''I asked them if they were serious about this issue," he said, adding that donor governments such as Britain and the United States convinced him that they would bring jobs, industries, electricity, and roads if Nangarhar stopped growing poppies.

He then involved the tribal elders -- a critical move in ethnic Pashtun society. He asked them to draw up lists of what kind of development projects they would like to see -- a ''carrot" to get each community to voluntarily decide not to grow poppies.

Hazrat Ali, a warlord who Karzai appointed police chief, provided the ''stick." Despite rumors that Ali's own militia members were involved in trafficking, Ali came down hard on farmers who planted poppies. According to a US official based in Kabul, Ali arrested farmers and held them in jail until their communities agreed to eradicate the fields.

To support the initiative, USAID hired Development Alternatives International, a Maryland-based consulting firm, to give the poorest farmers an alternative income. Known as Cash for Work, the project employs about 13,000 workers per day in Nangarhar, paying between $3 and $5 a day for monthlong projects digging irrigation ditches and flood- protection walls.

Many farmers say that the project employs too few people and that the wages are not even half what they could earn harvesting poppy.

Others say too much funding ends up in the hands of the Americans who run the projects. About $6 million of Cash for Work's annual $18 million budget is spent on administration. Yet the program is the most tangible proof that the international community will support Nangarhar in its decision to stop growing poppies.

Few thought the effort in Nangarhar would produce quick results. But in August, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, citing satellite images, reported that cultivation in Nangarhar had been almost completely wiped out.

A Western official who heads a major antinarcotics effort said he was mystified. ''Some say it's market correction, that they want to get rid of stockpiles," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Whatever the reason, he said, ''Haji Din Mohammad and Hazrat Ali did a great job."

Officials are less hopeful about 2006. Ali quit his post to run for parliament, a seat he is widely expected to win.

And what of Din Mohammad? Karzai moved him to another province, replacing him with a governor who has blocked antinarcotics efforts in the past. Afghan officials have characterized the move as a routine reshuffle, but Din Mohammad thinks otherwise. ''There is no doubt that some of the traffickers and the smugglers put pressure on the central government to transfer me from Nangarhar," he said. ''Because I stand against the traffickers."