The New 'Silk Road' Of Death

Col. Ulbaidulo Ahmadov climbs out of his rickety Soviet-era military vehicle. Ahead, down a long hillside of parched grass and across the shallow river Pandj, is Afghanistan, the source of roughly 75 percent of the world's heroin. Keeping it out of Tajikistan is Ahmadov's job. As commander of the 240-member Second Border Brigade, he's responsible for this 100-kilometer stretch of frontier. Dressed in mismatched camouflage fatigues and shower sandals, he gestures toward the river glittering in the distance. "I'd take you down there," he apologizes, "but I've run out of gas."

The heroin trade has no such problem. Mullah Omar, the patriarch of Afghanistan's state-sponsored brand of Islam, made international headlines a year ago when he outlawed opium farming as "un-Islamic." The trouble is, he didn't say a word about selling it. Raw opium is openly available in shops all over Afghanistan, and its heroin continues to saturate the European market. Massive overproduction in the '90s drove down heroin prices in the West and created huge unsold inventories in Afghanistan. International law enforcers estimate that the big traders are now holding as much as 3,000 tons of raw opium or its equivalent in processed heroin. Capt. Saif Riaz, a veteran of Pakistan's war on drugs, puts it another way: "They have sufficient stock to last at least 10 years."

The constant flood of narcotics is carving a new channel. Bypassing the heavily policed old export routes through Pakistan and Iran, as much as half the Afghan heroin in Europe now arrives via the desperately poor republics of the former Soviet Union. Western authorities call it the Silk Road, after the ancient trade network that once brought spices and luxury textiles across Central Asia to Europe. Poorly trained, primitively equipped and miserably underpaid, local police across the region are overwhelmed by the new plague. The unchecked traffic is subverting governments and releasing a virgin-soil epidemic of addiction. "The most lucrative markets are in Western Europe," says an Interpol spokesman. "But every time a country is used as a transit route, the number of addicts there rises sharply."

This is the underbelly of globalization. A decade ago, capitalism and heroin alike were practically nonexistent here. Now Russia alone is conservatively estimated to have 3 million addicts, a twelvefold increase over a decade ago. The pattern also prevails across Central Asia. AIDS, hepatitis and other needle-borne diseases are spreading unchecked. Russia now has more confirmed HIV cases than any other European country, and 90 percent of them afflict intravenous-drug users. Street crime, once a rarity, is rampant, and police corruption is all but ubiquitous. In some respects Western development aid and communications technology have only added to the problem. "You build nice roads, the drugs move faster," says Wolfgang Meierhofer, coordinator of the European Union's new counternarcotics program for Central Asia. "We are always years behind the smugglers. They always create new ways, especially with globalization."

Recently a team of NEWSWEEK reporters toured the new Silk Road. What they found was a disaster zone stretching thousands of kilometers, all the way from Afghanistan to Western Europe. They filed the following spot reports from a half-dozen way stations on the new highway to hell.

Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Saying Tajikistan's borders are "soft" would be too kind. Foreign diplomats and local journalists say the place is effectively run by a coalition of feudal warlords largely financed, directly or otherwise, by the drug trade. The country derives fully a third of its GDP from the heroin industry, according to U.N. estimates. Even so, Tajikistan's senior narcotics officer must be doing something right. Why else would a gang of gunmen have attacked his apartment in Dushanbe back in March? Maj. Gen. Rustam Nazarov escaped unhurt. "Do we know who the narco barons are?" he asked a NEWSWEEK reporter recently. He answered his own question: "Yes, we know." The United Nations pays his salary. So why doesn't he bust the crime bosses, no matter how high-ranking they may be? "I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to mention any names."