Flower Power

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, March 23, 2007— -- The men of Col. Fayyaz's Mobile Detection Labs gleefully set out their tools -- hammers, drills, flashlights, mirrors -- anything to quickly gut and expose the innards of a car.

His men have hacked more than 700 pounds of opium and heroin out of Afghan cars and trucks in the past year. They've had some luck at this checkpoint at the southern entrance to Afghanistan's capital

"We captured 47, 65, 100 kilo loads right here," says Fayyaz, bumming a cigarette from a reporter.

A few meaningless battles in an unwinnable war, Gen. Kemal Sadat, Afghanistan's embattled drug czar, calls those catches. Last year alone, Afghanistan produced 4,500 tons of opium, which is processed into heroin.

More than 90 percent of the world's heroin starts as a seed on an Afghan farm. And, at least locally, the proceeds go to arming the Taliban, says Sadat. Over the past three years, his men, officers like the potbellied Fayyaz, have captured and destroyed only 100 tons of the stuff.

Several tons of it are kept beneath Sadat's office behind a triple padlocked cage.

Like a Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound

At the checkpoint, the sleet's coming down sideways. And Fayyaz's men rummage through each car that comes by. Sometimes, Ursullah, the German shepherd who only understands German commands, is dragged out to inspect the cars.

The agents of the Mobile Detection Laboratories are trained by British customs officials. Nicki Piper, a blond agent who is huddled in her coat, is one of them. "It really boils down to luck if they find anything. There are so many ways to smuggle narcotics in the country."

The weather and this country's rugged geography played a huge role in helping Afghans eject the forces from some of history's greatest empires, from the Mongols to Queen Victoria's Tommies to the Soviets. But this time, Afghanistan is being defeated by geography and weather.

That defeat is etched on Kemal Sadat's face. His brush mustache and hair are dyed. The white creeping out from the roots seems to show that he's given up on maintaining the illusion of youth.

Afghanistan's drug czar's office is in one of the Soviet-style buildings that survived the weather and 30 years of war, clumped onto the Interior Ministry compound. Plaques line the mantel behind his desk like a series of taxidermied hunting trophies. There's one from the U.S. Department of Defense, another from the Drug Enforcement Agency.

He would have had a fair fight in the war against the country's booming narcotics trade if his own government ministers, his bosses, weren't in the thick of it. "The corruption goes top to bottom," he says.

The politicians boast huge compounds and security details, the manicured green laws of imported grass in their yards (including volleyball nets, which are surprisingly popular in Afghanistan), plush French furniture -- much of it paid for by smoothing over the drug trade.

A Living Wage, at Least in Afghanistan

Here's how it works: Narcotics smugglers pay farmers upfront to plant poppies, and even supply the seeds. Farmers receive about $75 an acre for their toil -- about 10 times the amount they'd get for wheat. It's about what Fayyaz's men, in their baggy uniforms and laceless boots, make in a month.

The farmers reap the poppy, then hand it over to the Taliban-affiliated drug smugglers. They swap the drugs with Afghanistan's warlords for pickups, surplus weapons, explosives and whatever else is sitting in stores fattened by the U.S. campaign against the Taliban.

The government ministers ease the export of the drugs to Iran or Pakistan for a slice of the profits. The higher ups get rich, the farmers feed their families and the Taliban has all the weapons it needs to fuel its insurgency -- and in the process wins the hearts and minds of farmers

Those small salaries mean big business for Afghanistan. The poppy trade accounts for 52 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

The tactic Sadat and the Afghan Interior Ministry have used to try to slow the trade is eradication -- uprooting the fields and urging farmers to grow other crops. Sadat admits, "This policy is not good. It turns the farmers against us. The Taliban says, 'Look, the government prevents you from growing poppy, but we will let you, who do you think you should support?"

The London-based think-tank the Senlis Council argues that the key to stabilizing Afghanistan is stopping the poppy trade. And the best way to do that is not to burn, slash, uproot or poison crops, but to license the cultivation of poppies by farmers for medicine -- the key ingredient in codeine and morphine.

Sadat agrees. It would probably work better, but the eradication of poppy, the scourge of Afghanistan, is written into the constitution. To license poppy, he says, the constitution must be change. Certainly, he says, the country's drug czar can't change that. And definitely not when ministers in his own government are taking part of the cut.

So for now, the best he can do is keep sending Fayyaz' men out to the gates of Kabul to gut open cars, and hope they get lucky.