Afghan druglords

Afghan drugs kingpin jailed for 15 years in New York

Fri Oct 5, 4:34 PM ET


NEW YORK (AFP) - An Afghan heroin kingpin who was the first person ever extradited to the United States from Afghanistan was jailed for more than 15 years on Friday for running an international drugs ring.

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Baz Mohammad, 51, who has been described by President George W. Bush as one of the world's most-wanted drug kingpins, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court in July last year to charges of conspiring to import heroin.

He was extradited to the United States under an order signed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in October 2005.

According to prosecutors, Mohammad led an international heroin-trafficking organization between 1990 and 2005 that was responsible for manufacturing and distributing millions of dollars worth of heroin in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They said the ring was closely aligned with the ousted Taliban regime in Afghanistan and provided financial support to the hardline Islamist regime.

"Baz Mohammad is a narcotics kingpin whose drug organization, operating under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, made millions of dollars from the sale of heroin," US Attorney Michael Garcia said.

"Today's sentencing is a gratifying conclusion to an important prosecution that would not have been possible without unprecedented cooperation between law enforcement authorities in the United States and Afghanistan."

According to a federal indictment, Mohammad told members of his organization that selling heroin in the United States was an act of "jihad," or holy war, because they were taking Americans' money for a product that would kill them.

This post has been edited by Hollander on Nov 12 2007, 05:39 AM

No wonder he got arrested, extradited, and found guilty lol!!!!!

Afghan man arrested in New York narco-terrorism case
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Friday, October 24th 2008, 11:01 PM

NEW YORK - An Afghan man was brought to the United States on Friday to face charges that he led an international drug trafficking organization that helped fund the Taliban to fight Americans, prosecutors said.

An indictment unsealed in Manhattan accused Haji Juma Khan, 54, of conspiring to produce huge quantities of drugs in two southern Afghanistan provinces since at least 1999. Prosecutors said he was one of the first to be prosecuted under a 2006 federal narco-terrorism law.

Prosecutors said his organization produced quantities as large as 40 tons of morphine base, an opium derivative that can be processed into heroin. Forty tons would be enough to supply the entire U.S. heroin market for more than two years, they said.

Khan pleaded not guilty through an interpreter in U.S. District Court in Manhattan after arriving in the United States earlier in the day.

His lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.

On Thursday, Khan was detained in Indonesia and turned over to the United States, which had sent a notice to Interpol that he was being sought, authorities said. Khan had just arrived in Jakarta on a flight from Dubai, they said.

Prosecutors said Khan was closely aligned with the Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan until it was removed from power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

They said Khan has supported the Taliban's efforts to forcibly remove the United States from Afghanistan by providing financial support. In return, Khan's drug operation was protected by the Taliban, the indictment said.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia called the arrest "another significant step in the continuing effort to combat terrorism by stopping the flow of narcotics proceeds that help fund the Taliban and other terrorist organizations."

Michele M. Leonhart, Drug Enforcement Administration acting administrator, said the arrest "disrupts a significant line of credit to the Taliban and will shake the foundation of his drug network that has moved massive quantities of heroin of worldwide drug markets."

According to the indictment, Afghanistan is the world's largest producer and trafficker of heroin, accounting for about 90 percent of the opium poppy used to produce heroin.

The indictment said Khan's drug trafficking organization operated primarily in the Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

POPPY PROBLEMS
NATO is set to end its hands off policy on the heroin trade
Tom Blackwell , Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, November 06, 2008

KABUL - The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border.

Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park.

To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt - where Canadian troops operate - to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named.


Afghanistan still produces 90 per cent of the world's heroine.
Paul Hilton/Bloomberg News

First, you sign your death certificate, then you start working," the smuggler said in a recent interview, as he nervously chain smoked. "People are hungry. They will kill you if they know you carry a big amount of money."

Such traffickers may soon have another danger to worry about, too. A new NATO policy would see troops from Canada and other countries play a bigger role in combating Afghanistan's massive heroin trade, effectively ending the alliance's standoff approach to the issue.

The idea is that NATO soldiers would go after narcotics operations when there is some indication they are tied to the insurgency.

A graphic illustration of that link came earlier this week in the south of Kandahar province. U.S. and Afghan troops were searching an area known for its insurgent activity when they stumbled on a drug factory and almost 40 tonnes of hashish.

Last month, American police charged a Kandahar-based man with conspiracy to traffic drugs to support terrorism, alleging that he had financed the Taliban.

"The government of Afghanistan has been saying for the last two years that NATO has to be involved in (drug) operations on the ground," said Zalmai Aszali, a spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter-narcotics.

"The bullet coming out of the barrel of the AK-47 of the insurgents is being financed by drug traffickers."

Much has been made lately of the reduced poppy harvest this year, but Afghanistan still produces more than 90 per cent of the world's heroin, and NATO estimates that $50 million to $200 million of the proceeds flow to the insurgents annually. Millions more feed the corruption that eats away at the weak Afghan government.

Although the Americans and British are independently involved in the drug war, the alliance as a whole has shied away from it, with members at odds over thorny issues like poppy eradication.

But they agreed last month to begin more aggressively combating drug smugglers and factories - although not farmers - if a link to the insurgency is shown.

Aszali said the government would like Canadian and other international troops to attack the fast-moving drug convoys, which often use late-model SUVs that can outrun the police.

Protection for the anti-narcotics police as they crack down on heroin operations would also be appreciated, since more than 70 of them have died in clashes with the heavily armed cartels, he said. Also, satellite and other technology used by NATO could aid in uncovering the secret routes smugglers use to get drugs out of Afghanistan and pre-cursor chemicals in, said the official.

Authorities believe that convoys smuggle out huge quantities of heroin - several metric tonnes at a time, said Christina Oguz, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan. She said she welcomes NATO involvement in tackling the problem.

"It's not possible to draw a watertight line between narcotics and the insurgents. Sometimes, they are the same people," she said in an interview. "You can't say 'First, we take the insurgents, then we take the narcotics' "

Canada, for one, is concerned about the strong link between the two and the insurgent violence that results, said Jamie Christoff, a spokesman for the Canadian government in Kandahar.

It has already committed to spend $27 million on "alternative livelihoods" for farmers and is contributing $30 million to the UN drugs office in Afghanistan.

But how the new NATO agreement will affect troops on the ground is still being hammered out, Canadian and alliance officials say.

Under the previous rules, NATO forces could attack civilians involved in the heroin industry to aid "force protection," in other words if the troops were threatened directly by the drug gangs, said Brig.-Gen. Richard Blanchette, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, the alliance's Afghan mission.

Under the new rules, they can get involved based on a less-definitive connection between heroin gangs and insurgents, he said.

"If there is a link but it's on the line . . . in some cases, we would now be allowed to take action," he said.

Meanwhile, the Counter-narcotics Ministry is urging Canada and other NATO powers responsible for southern provinces where poppy cultivation is still rampant to use at least some of their aid as a financial incentive to curb the heroin industry.

If they keep doling out money without tying it to a reduction in poppy production, "we will not be able to achieve the results we seek," Gen. Khodaidad, the Afghan anti-narcotics minister, said recently.

Canada generally does support the Good Performance Initiative, which rewards provinces that eliminate poppy cultivation with more aid money, said Christoff, but it does not contribute directly to it.

The Kabul smuggler said he believes NATO's involvement could put a serious dent in the trade. He is not a high-volume operator himself, but moves a few kilograms of heroin at a time from the capital to the Tajikistan border, clearing about $1,500 in a good month, still more than three times the average Afghan annual income.

The UN says about 20 per cent of Afghanistan's heroin is smuggled out of the north and into the Central Asian republics or even China, while the rest flows south into Pakistan or Iran.

The smuggler buys drugs from suppliers in Kabul, then pays truck drivers about $300 a kilo to hide the stuff in their shipments of wheat, vegetables or other legal goods.

The courier goes on ahead and meets the trucker in Faizabad, capital of the mountainous northern province of Badakhshan, where he estimates that 70 per cent of residents are involved in the narcotics trade. Police are bribed to the tune of about $500 per 20 kilograms of drugs.

From Faizabad, couriers travel by donkey to the border with Tajikistan. A popular crossing point is the village of Ishkashem, which melds into a town on the other side of the frontier.

The courier hands the stash to another smuggler, who takes it across the Panj river to Tajikistan, where the Russian mafia is said to be active.

"People who live on both sides of the river have the same (Tajik) traditions, the same culture," said the smuggler. "They are part of one big family."




© National Post 2008

Upcoming Changes to the Drug-Insurgency Nexus in Afghanistan, By Jacob Townsend. Terrorism Monitor, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, January 23, 2009

US troops seize 16.5 tons of drugs in Afghanistan
By FISNIK ABRASHI – 3 days ago

KABUL (AP) — American and Afghan forces seized 16.5 tons (15 metric tons) of drugs and killed 34 militants during a three-day operation against a key insurgent stronghold in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. military statement said Thursday.

The seizure was one of the biggest by foreign troops in Afghanistan since 2001 and an indication of a nexus between the insurgency and the drug trade that fuels it.

The narcotics were taken following an operation in the village of Marjah, a major drug-processing hub in Helmand province, which is the world's largest opium poppy producing region.

"They hit them where it hurts the most in a main command node and in the wallet," said Col. Greg Julian, the chief U.S. military spokesman.

During the operation, which started May 19, the troops also discovered 45 tons (40 metric tons) of ammonium nitrate, ammonium chloride and other material for homemade explosives, the statement said.

A statement said forces discovered black tar opium, processed heroin and morphine — all of which are derived from poppy plants.

They also discovered a "massive supply of heroin-refining products," the statement said.

For years, U.S. and other western officials have said the booming drug production in southern provinces, where insurgency is strongest and the government weakest, is funding the Taliban's war.

The United Nations has warned that the Taliban and drug lords have pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from the trade, which also feeds corruption among government officials.

The massive drug production complicates efforts to effectively fight the Taliban, which have made a violent comeback in the last three years following their initial defeat in 2001.

Attempting to reverse these trends, President Barack Obama has ordered most of the new 21,000 U.S. troops to join the fight in the south.

During the operation in Marjah, the coalition troops killed 34 militants and seized weapons, communication equipment, Russian-made night vision goggles and U.S. military vehicle parts, the statement said.

In other violence, seven militants died Wednesday after a firefight and airstrikes in the central Ghazni province, another U.S. military statement said.

The joint force was after a Taliban subcommander involved in attacks in eastern Afghanistan. The wanted man, who was not identified, was detained.

Another two militants were killed and six others detained after a clash near Helmand's capital of Lashkar Gah on Thursday.

War On Taliban Shifts To Drug Lords
Alleged Kingpin Captured By U.S. Signals New Policy Of Targeting Heroin Trade Bankrolling Terrorists
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/24/...in5110868.shtml

US changes tack on Afghan poppies

The United States is to change the way it deals with the massive poppy growing industry in Afghanistan.

Instead of destroying the crops it will spend money encouraging Afghan farmers to grow different ones.

US special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, at a G8 meeting in Italy, said current measures against poppy growers had been "a failure".

The conference of foreign ministers in Trieste also called for credible elections in Afghanistan in August.

Mr Holbrooke said that existing programmes of eradication had not reduced by one dollar the amount of money the Taliban earned from production.

"Spraying the crops just penalises the farmer and they grow crops somewhere else. The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on crop eradication has not had any damage on the Taliban."

"On the contrary, it has helped them recruit. This is the least effective programme ever," Mr Holbrooke added.

Mr Holbrooke said in future destruction of poppy fields would be phased out and the money instead redirected to farmers to grow different crops.

The move was welcomed by delegates at the G8 conference.

One said the policy of eradication had been a "sad joke".

The Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, said the G8 backed President Hamid Karzai's appeal to the Taliban to take part in the Afghanistan elections in August.

Richard Holbrooke said the fairness of the elections would determine the legitimacy of the government.

"We have just seen a spectacularly bad example just next door in Iran", he said.

Afghan drug lord in US for trial
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:29:32 GMT


Afghanistan supplies more than 90 percent of the world's heroin.

A reputed Afghan drug lord held over accusations of smuggling heroin to the United States is set to face a pending trial in Washington.

The defendant, identified as Haji Bagcho, appeared before a federal magistrate in Washington on Monday.

He faces an indictment for heroin trafficking conspiracy and for importing heroin into the US and some other countries

Bagcho was arrested during an undercover operation conducted by Afghan law enforcement in eastern Khost province.

He was flown to the US last week to answer an indictment for heroin trafficking.

Sources described Bagcho as 'a big fish' who had made profits of more than $100 million over the several past months.

Afghanistan's opiate output has risen more than 40-fold since the 2001 US-led invasion, according to the United Nations' figures.

Afghanistan's eastern and southern provinces produce much of the heroin that funds the Taliban.

The conflict-torn country supplies more than 90 percent of the world's heroin.

JR/AKM

Secretive Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Emerges in Power Struggle
Pakistani Taliban Faces Mafia-Like Power Struggle
By NICK SCHIFRIN
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 11, 2009 — The Pakistani Taliban today is like a mafia family whose don has just been whacked -- leaderless, with blood flowing in the streets between rival factions.

U.S. and Pakistani officials now predict that the consiglieres who will stabilize the region's strongest terrorist network are the very people the U.S. has been fighting since 9/11: al Qaeda and Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban.

Pakistani Taliban commanders have been bickering since a CIA drone strike killed their charismatic leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who over the last year and a half managed to pull together at least 13 fractious Taliban factions into a network blamed for the deaths of more than 1,200 people.

Their bickering turned violent over the weekend when Mehsud's most likely successors shot at each other during a meeting to pick the next Pakistani Taliban chief.

In response, Mullah Omar and his allies in North Waziristan, according to people who have spoken with Pakistani intelligence agents there, called a meeting with leading Taliban commanders to try and stop the infighting. A successor to Mehsud could emerge from that meeting in the coming days.

For continuous and complete coverage of Afghanistan in the run-up to the presidential election next week, click here.

Mullah Omar was deposed as the leader of Afghanistan in 2001 when U.S. special forces troops invaded and helped rebel Afghan forces route the Taliban. The attack was in retaliation for Mullah Omar harboring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the years before the 9/11 attacks.

The U.S. has been hunting Mullah Omar since, but the secretive one-eyed Taliban leader has eluded his enemies while presiding over a growing Taliban force that has battled the U.S. in the southern part of Afghanistan to a stalemate.

Omar has intervened with the Pakistani Taliban before. He was the only person, according to Aftab Sherpao, Pakistan's interior minister at the time, who could break a deadlock when Mehsud was chosen in 2007.

Al Qaeda's Arab commanders have also been angling to install their own "chief terrorist" as head of the Pakistani Taliban, says Pakistan's current interior minister, Rehman Malik. U.S. and Pakistani officials believe al Qaeda is strongly trying to push the Taliban to choose a leader who will protect their safe havens in the Pakistani tribal areas and continue to allow al Qaeda plans to be executed by Taliban fighters.

Both al Qaeda and the Quetta Shura, which Omar heads, "need a support base and they need hide outs," says Amir Rana, head of Pakistan's Institute for Peace Studies. "It will be difficult for them to sustain their operations in Afghanistan if they lose this."


Shifting the Focus Back to Afghanistan
If Omar -- likely with the assistance of Sirajuddin Haqqani and his family's network in North Waziristan -- does choose the next Pakistani Taliban leader, he will likely choose someone who will shift the network's focus from Pakistan back to Afghanistan, where 100,000 international troops are currently fighting a war widely believed to be a stalemate.

That could make Pakistan safer, analysts say, but make the war in Afghanistan more dangerous for U.S. troops. It would also be akin to the militancy during the 1980s and 1990s, when fighters from many countries all fought together in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. When the Pakistani fighters crossed the border home, they would target minority Shiite Muslims or Indian targets in Kashmir instead of Pakistani targets.

But analysts warn that neither Omar nor al Qaeda nor any other commander in the region will have the level of control over Taliban factions that Baitullah Mehsud did. And that means that it is difficult to predict whether the Taliban Movement in Pakistan, as Mehsud's group was known, will be able to focus just on targets in Afghanistan or on targets in Pakistan, or whether many small groups will be choosing their own focus.

"Mehsud was an international figure and he commanded the respect of all the Taliban leaders," Sherpao says. "That sort of a situation is not there anymore."

U.S. officials hope to keep the pressure on the Taliban during these days when it is without a leader. Today an unmanned CIA drone launched at least the 30th strike on the tribal areas this year, according to an ABC News tally. At least one missile hit a hideout for Mehsud's Taliban supporters, according to a U.S. official. At least eight people were killed, the Associated Press reported.

But the U.S. says it also needs the Pakistani military to keep the pressure on the Taliban and to keep a promise to use a ground force to invade South Waziristan, Mehsud's former stronghold.

"The more military pressure, the more likely the Taliban will break up," says a U.S. official.


The Creation of a Local Militia
But Pakistani analysts doubt whether the army is capable or willing to invade South Waziristan, one of the most inhospitable terrains on the planet.

Instead, Pakistan may choose to try to create a lashkar, or local militia, in the areas where the Taliban are the strongest. Many of the elders in the greater Mehsud tribe have left South Waziristan and will privately admit they hated Baitullah Mehsud's influence over their area.

But Mehsud elders doubt whether the tribe will fight on behalf of the military. "The Taliban are not from the outside. They are our own people, our own sons, our own brothers," says retired major Mohammad Zuman Mehsud, who is from the same area as Baitullah Mehsud but now lives in Karachi. "They will never go against their own people."

Pakistan's army has launched two separate incursions into South Waziristan in the past, each of which ended in peace deals. The U.S. hopes history does not repeat itself -- and that the government's promises to defeat the militants "until the logical conclusion" are not empty.

"It all depends," says a U.S. official, "on which Pakistan chooses to show up."

US 'to target' 50 Afghan 'drug lords'
August 10, 2009
Fifty alleged Afghan drug traffickers with suspected ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon list of people targeted for elimination, The New York Times says.

Citing a congressional study due to be released this week, the newspaper said the targeting reflected a major shift in US counter narcotics strategy in Afghanistan.

According to the report, US military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military's rules of engagement and international law.

They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency, the paper noted.

Two US generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the "joint integrated prioritised target list," which means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders and can be captured or killed at any time, The Times pointed out.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list, according to the report.

"We have a list of 367 kill or capture' targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency," one of the generals told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff.

The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The Times in advance of its release.

From The Times
August 11, 2009

Too much money makes it all too difficult to stop drugs trade

Tom Coghlan

There have been no convictions inside Afghanistan against the kingpins making hundreds of millions of dollars at the apex of the country’s drugs pyramid.

Western counter-narcotics officials point out that building such cases, even in Western countries, usually takes years. In Afghanistan, where the tentacles of an industry worth $3.4 billion have a corrupting influence on almost every facet of government, it is infinitely harder.

Where convictions are achieved they don’t always stick. President Karzai of Afghanistan recently pardoned five men sentenced to 16-18 years for the movement of 120kg of heroin. One of those released was the nephew of the campaign manager to Mr Karzai’s election campaign.

The Afghan drug mafia benefits from political protection as well as the country’s lawlessness and its lack of infrastructure. The Taleban network is just one of many that profit from taxing the production of drugs; from controlling, protecting and facilitating the movement of narcotics.

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In Helmand province, where more than half the world’s heroin is produced, parts of the Afghan police are often involved, along with local militias — some of whom work alongside British forces.

Although there have been some recent successes in tackling police corruption, the prize of becoming an Afghan Border Police commander on a key drug trafficking route is still likely to cost potential candidates hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to officials farther up the chain.

The money is easily recouped, though, when counter-narcotics officials say that a commander can make $400,000 by “going to sleep” while a large drug smuggling convoy moves across his patch of the border.

Following the resulting drug-money trail becomes that much harder when the hawala system of local money changers is widely used by the drug mafia in preference to Western electronic banking.

The system is all based on trust — the only evidence of money movement is likely to be a phone call between two hawala dealers in different cities or countries who agree the transfer of a sum to be settled at a later date.

The system is widely used across the Middle East, particularly by migrant workers to transfer money home, entirely legitimately.

When counter-narcotics officials tried to arrest the three biggest hawala dealers in the province of Nangarhar two years ago, it brought the entire economy of the province to a halt and the three had to be released.

The drug mafia also frequently moves money in the form of luxury goods; 4x4 vehicles are very popular with drug smugglers in Helmand.

The current construction boom in Kabul, the capital, is evidence of the laundering of the country’s drug billions into legitimate business, as are parts of the economic bubble — that is now bursting — in Dubai and the Gulf states.