KEY POINTS:
A flourishing heroin-for-guns trade is sustaining the Taleban insurgency despite the presence of thousands of international troops.
Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs across Europe are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers say Russian arms dealers meet Taleban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan's desert.
The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns - and sometimes a bit of sex on the side.
The drugs are destined for the streets of Europe, the guns go straight to the Taleban front line.
The weapons on sale include machine guns, sniper rifles and anti-aircraft weapons like the ones used in the attempt to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently and in the ambush of an Australian patrol in the southern province of Oruzgan in which a soldier died.
"We never sell the drugs for money," said a smuggler. "We exchange them for ammunition and Kalashnikovs."
The drugs come mostly from Helmand, where most of Britain's 7800 troops are based.
The opium grown there is turned into heroin at factories inside Afghanistan, sold into Tajikistan and smuggled to Europe.
The guns are broken down into parts, smuggled back into Afghanistan and delivered to the Taleban. One kilogram of heroin can buy about 30 AK-47 assault rifles at the bazaar.
Nato claims the Taleban get between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of their income from drugs but the smugglers' claims suggest the real cost could be far higher.
The smugglers described a bleak village hidden in the desert near the border where up to 300 shopkeepers sit in small booths in open-air courtyards, acting as agents for the Russian mafia. A smuggler, Daoud, says they also act as agents for corrupt officials in the Afghani Government.
Around them lurk Tajik prostitutes, selling themselves for a few scraps of surplus heroin. "They just want some heroin and we always have some spare," said another smuggler.
Daoud said from his headquarters in Kunduz province that Afghan smugglers lugged sacks of grade-A heroin across the river Oxus, which marks the Tajik border.
They drove pick-ups as far as they could, took motorbikes where the vehicles could not go and finished the journey on foot. "We leave early in the evening and get there around 9am the next day," he said.
The heroin is harvested from opium farms across Afghanistan and taken to factories in the remote Pamir mountains in the Badakhshan region, where it is turned into heroin.
Daoud said it took about 15kg of opium to make 1kg of heroin.
"We are like a company," he said "We have some big sponsors in the Government."
A kilogram of the best heroin is worth 600 ($1522) in Afghanistan but twice that at the Tajikistan bazaar. The smugglers prefer weapons to cash because they double their value in Afghanistan. An AK-47 assault rifle costs 50 ($125) at the bazaar but is worth at least 100 in Afghanistan. Fighters in Helmand expect to get six AK-47s for 1kg of heroin, a similar number of rocket-propelled grenades or a dozen boxes of ammunition.
British special forces have arrested or killed drugs smugglers linked to the insurgency, alongside a secretive unit of the Afghan army called 333, but the bulk of the International Security Assistance Force is handicapped by its mandate, which does not include counter-narcotics operations.
The smugglers claim they are "untouchable" because of their government contacts. And although British officials suspect senior government insiders are involved in the drugs trade, they have struggled to get the support from Karzai, or the evidence, to arrest them.
Opium production has soared since 2001. The head of British-led efforts to crack down on the crop, David Belgrove, said: "This proves there's clear evidence that the drugs trade fuels the insurgency."
The commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, the US general, Dan McNeill, pledged to take his mandate to the limit to target drug traffickers. But so far, the smugglers insist they are not feeling the pinch. "The heroin is what lets us fight," said a Taleban source.
DRUG SUMS
* 15kg of opium makes 1kg of heroin.
* 1kg of heroin is worth $1522 in Afghanistan.
* AK-47 assault rifles cost around $125.
- THE INDEPENDENT
