JOIN USMundra Port drug haul and the US link to Afghan heroin
The story so far. On September 16, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized a gargantuan consignment of three tonnes of refined heroin from an Ahmedabad warehouse. This is the biggest catch ever in the documented history of opiate smuggling and left drug enforcement agencies searching for many answers to a plethora of questions. Former finance minister P Chidambaram's views expressed in his weekly column that this large consignment to India could not have come to Mundra Port without the involvement of people in high places suggests the enormity of the crime or should we call it a scandal.
A lower court in Bhuj, Gujarat, has asked some pointed questions from the DRI. They follow an interesting trajectory and have disturbing implications for the port owners, too: How will the Mundra Adani Port benefit from the consignment landing there? How did such a big heroin haul land at the Adani-owned Mundra Port when the final destination was Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh? Were the systems of Mundra Port lax that encouraged the opium smugglers to direct their precious booty to this western Gujarat port?
Interestingly, this container ostensibly carrying talcum rocks left Afghanistan much before Kabul fell to the Taliban on August 15? The big question remains: who in India had the financial depth to pay off millions of dollars or thereabouts to the suppliers of this high-quality three-tonnes of heroin? Usually, drug seizures by enforcement agencies are a fraction of the total amount that gets smuggled into India, which has claimed itself to be a transit country despite being the only licit producer of opium.
Afghan drugs - a background
Going by this understanding of how much opium and its derivatives have already entered the country? Was the drug cartel populated by warlords aware of the coming of the Taliban and wanted to clean up the fields before the religious extremists that had banned opium cultivation in the past, take over the country? Even Afghanistan's neighbour Iran, which the UNODC considers a major interceptor of opium and its derivatives, has seen a spike in its seizures. Understandably, the Mundra Port shipload of heroin originated from Kandahar and was loaded into two containers at Iran's Bandar Abbas port. An earlier seizure in Mumbai had originated from Iran's Chabahar port, which an Indian company manages. The Iranians have blamed the rise of smuggling on the US occupation of Afghanistan.
There may be some truth in this allegation. The opium cultivation in the country spiked only after the US-led western forces took over Afghanistan in 2001. Strangely, what never gets traction is the complicity of Western powers in the enlargement of poppy plantations in the war-ravaged country. The western media, which monopolised the coverage of Afghanistan, never seriously blamed the occupiers as they went about perpetuating a myth of the country being a "graveyard of empires" when it was, in fact, the graveyard of hope and turned ordinary Afghan farmers as poppy planters and smugglers - all on the wrong side of the law.
The United Kingdom, for instance, policed the opium-growing area of Helmand for more than a decade, but the production zoomed. There are allegations that techniques to boost poppy production were introduced during these years. Similarly, a method to produce methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant, has been introduced in Afghanistan.
After the Taliban were ousted in 2001, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan jumped to 3,400 tonnes in just a space of two years from the low of 180 tonnes. The Taliban had banned opium cultivation, and since then, there has been no looking back. The UNODC reckoned that by 2003 the Afghan drugs were raking in $2.3 billion from growing poppies to trafficking its derivatives. When the time came for the US and international forces to leave Afghanistan this year, the production had reached astronomical levels of 9000+ tonnes.
So desperate were the drug cartels and their western mentors to earn a fast buck before they bid goodbye to Afghanistan that in 2020 the UNODC found that there was a 37 per cent jump in the area under poppy cultivation to 24,400 hectares, with each hectare giving 28 kg of dry opium. The drug mafia is rescuing this bountiful crop of 2020-21 from the Taliban, who ironically are being accused by the West for living off drug proceeds. It's a different matter that there is no evidence to suggest that, and the UNODC reports, over the years, make light of these allegations.
In 2007-08, an international consultant embedded with the Afghan palace shared with this writer the information that unmarked flights routinely left from Kandahar airport carrying poppies or dry opium to undisclosed destinations. There's nothing to suggest that these flights ever discontinued as long as the US was in occupation. The truth that has emerged many times in various US Congressional hearings is that though Washington spent $8 billion to help eradicate opium cultivation in Afghanistan, the US army men were routinely asked to look the other way when they encountered opium farmers or drug lords.
Post-2001 US occupation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to make drug eradication a cornerstone of US policy on Afghanistan. The country was used by US covert agencies laundering drug money and financing their operations around the world. In the words of an academic, they ran a "Ponzi" scheme in Afghanistan. US government admittedly spent $2 trillion in this landlocked country in the name of stabilizing the country. As stated above, $8 billion in fighting poppy cultivation only helped increase drug production in the country and generated a lot of unaccounted cash to support the many US misadventures. In 2008, UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa claimed that after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers that led to the global meltdown, drug money was used for opening up cash strapped investment banks. Costa said: "In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital."
In the backdrop of this understanding, where was the heroin from Mundra destined? And who was putting up the money to pay for the huge consignment? The country may need urgent answers to these questions.
(The writer is Editor of the Delhi-based magazine, Hardnews)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the authors' own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.