Who's watching the watchdogs?

• Author: Lubin, Nancy
• Position: Pressing Issues

Imagine a smuggler approaches, one former border guard told me, describing how guards patrol in groups of two or three over sparse terrain. "He tells you that if you turn the other way for five minutes, you can be a millionaire. But if you don't, he will send your corpse to Moscow. What would you do?"

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A U.S. Customs Service agent won awards and accolades for seizing more than 100 tons of marijuana over four years--but was then found to have conspired with the drug traffickers themselves so that other, far more lucrative drug shipments would make it safely to the United States. (1) His story, we were told, is not unique.

For the second time in six years, the Mexican government dismantled an elite federal anti-drug unit in early 2003 because the unit was found to be working closely with drug traffickers. "Virtually no Mexican anti-drug agency has remained free of infiltration by powerful drug gangs," the American press reported, largely because of "scant public oversight." (2)

A recent report on National Public Radio describes "a systemic and ongoing problem of corruption among officers" of U.S. law enforcement agencies in charge of patrolling the border with Mexico. "Easy money is an obvious factor," the report states, but blood ties among people with links on both sides of the border, as well as other factors, also play a big role. (3) And even with tough legislation, independent judiciaries and an aggressive investigative press, many other countries have discovered that corruption in counter-drug law enforcement units can still be exceptionally high.

But not in Central Asia, I was told last spring. (4) Or at least not until very recently. On the Tajik border of Afghanistan in May 2002, as we watched 55 kilograms of seized heroin, raw opium and hashish being incinerated in fat rubber tires, Russian military officials of the Moskovskii border guard detachment assured me that virtually none of Tajikistan's border guards had been apprehended for involvement in trafficking, at least over the past decade. Perhaps in the 1980s, they considered, but they couldn't remember.

Back in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, I was assured that corruption was categorically absent from the elite drug control units, and that government officials are uniformly committed to fighting this scourge. I heard the same story from high government officials farther north in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. It was the rare exception when someone went bad--a case of a bad apple, rather than the "bad barrels" reported by National Public Radio.

In countries with only a limited free press and no investigative journalism, where the courts and entire judicial system are heavily in the hands of the state, where living standards are low and cross border `blood ties' extensive, and where there is no independent oversight over law enforcement, how have they done it? Or how would one know? Recently, I am told by Tajik officials, there in fact has been a crackdown in Tajikistan, and many offenders at all levels have been arrested. Why the sudden change? (5)

These questions lie at the heart of international counternarcotics trafficking efforts in Central Asia today. The history of Central Asian drug trafficking, and the attempts to stop it, is one of smoke and mirrors; sorting through the nature of the problem itself and how best to address it has become an often unfathomable challenge. What is the nature and scale of the drug trafficking problem through Central Asia today? Where have local and international efforts been successful in combating this problem, and where has their impact been controversial, or even counterproductive? What does this tell us about the challenges we face today?

At a time when the United States has committed close to $100 million in 2002 to counternarcotics trafficking programs in Afghanistan and Central Asia, these questions are not academic. (6) In the United States and other countries, an army of local and international officials and specialists clearly are committed to eradicating this trade. But with oversight extremely weak, both from within these countries and from without, there are also challenges that surpass those visible to Western observers. It is critical to examine these challenges, and to examine the record of the past, if the substantial investments being made today are to address the range of drug trafficking problems in this part of the world--and to avoid inadvertently making them worse.

BACKGROUND

Opium poppy used to grow wild in Central Asia. As a graduate student at Tashkent State University in the 1970s, I remember hearing about the annual crop eradication efforts carried out by the Soviet government. "Mak 79" ("mak" is the Russian word for "poppy") was my earliest first-hand encounter with these efforts in the spring of 1979. The raids were considered something of a joke at the time. However fairly or unfairly, most Central Asians I knew seemed to believe that Soviet leaders themselves were benefiting from the drug trade; if leaders were really committed to wiping out the crop, they believed, it would have been done quickly and effectively.

By the beginning of the 1990s, drug cultivation in Central Asia had been severely curtailed, and over the past decade, Central Asia has been relevant to the drug trade primarily as a transit point for narcotics from Afghanistan on their way to Russia, Europe and beyond. Some locals say the collapse of the USSR triggered a commitment on the part of the leaders of these new states to eradicate the drug trade altogether; others more cynically suggest it triggered a commitment from those benefiting from the trade to shift their "investments" from cultivation to trafficking.

In either case, after a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent political unrest, economic strains and social upheavals, the flow of raw opium and heroin from Afghanistan grew dramatically throughout the 1990s. Opium poppy production in Afghanistan reached a peak of between 2,900 and 4,600 metric tons in 1999 and 2000. (7) The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that by 2000 some three-quarters of the world's heroin supply was originating from opium cultivated in Afghanistan and smuggled through mountainous terrain that is particularly difficult to control. (8)

In early 2001, the Taliban regime began enforcing its long-stated but long-ignored ban on opium production. The sudden reversal of the Taliban, which had drawn great profit from taxing the opium trade since coming to power, led to an almost total eradication of the annual poppy crop in Afghanistan. (9) But due to huge stockpiles, the trade did not diminish dramatically With the onset of the war in Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban, Afghan farmers have renewed the planting of opium, bringing the 2002 harvest almost to its 1999-2000 record levels. (10) Afghanistan is again dominating the world market for opium, and Central Asia is experiencing, in the words of the UN, "a dramatic increase in drug trafficking across all its five countries." (11)

There is some disagreement over the actual volume of narcotics transported through Central Asia today. Until the turn of the 21st century, most of the drugs grown in Afghanistan reached Western consumers through Pakistan and Iran, but a clampdown on drug trafficking in Iran and the increasingly porous borders of Central Asia have shifted that balance. By the turn of the century, the UN and others reported that as much as half to two-thirds of all narcotics trafficked from Afghanistan passed through the Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan on their way to European and Russian markets, and sometimes to the United States and Canada. (12) Others estimate that the actual proportion is lower but maintain that Central Asia's role remains significant. (13)

PLAYERS AND PROFITS

Most of this heroin finds its way to Russia and Western Europe, and often brings vast profits along the way. Some experts have estimated that by 2000, the opium cultivated in Afghanistan, sold in the form of heroin at retail prices, was worth roughly $100 billion. In Afghanistan, one kilogram of opium cost about $30; in Moscow, one kilogram of heroin (made from ten kilograms of opium) cost up to $30,000; and in Western Europe, the same kilogram of heroin, sold at the retail level in gram units or smaller, cost as much as $150,000. (14)

These drug profits reportedly have been shared generously with local law enforcement and other key actors throughout Central Asia. Western observers have pointed to widespread corruption among police, border guards, customs and other government officials as one of the most important factors sustaining the large drug flow in Central Asia. (15) Customs and other law enforcement officials in all five countries customarily pay some thousands of dollars in bribes just to get an entry-level job. Even though the salary is low, it is understood that they will earn back their investment in a short amount of time. Citizens who have been detained by customs officials for possession of small amounts of narcotics independently list the same types of bribes requested for different kinds of offenses. One destitute woman who decided to make...