On the way back to the car, Aman collared an old acquaintance and led him to the Land Cruiser and said that I could ask him questions about opium production. Hajji Mohammed, a gentle 50-year-old man, got in and explained how the biscuits were made by scraping the pods of opium poppies until the resin builds up on the edge of a knife. The resin is then collected on a plate and wrapped in leaves. As he talked, people gathered around the car, watching Hajji Mohammed give his interview through the windows. They saw the notebook. They saw him talking to a foreigner, and after a few long minutes, Hajji Mohammed said through Aman that he was scared of the other bazaaris. We were getting him in deep water. "Let's go talk to the police," Aman suggested. That seemed a little weird, but it seemed that we had to quickly put in a good word for Hajji Mohammed so that something unfortunate wouldn't happen to him. There is a police station just outside of town, and Qasim started the car, where halfway down the hill, it stalled. I imagined a crowd of angry opium sellers surging down the hill after us like an army of the undead, but of course it didn't happen, because they are not violent people. Qasim pulled on the wire, got the machine started again, and in a minute we were at the office of Hajji Abdul, the local magistrate.

"Who are you and what is your purpose for coming here?" Hajji Abdul wanted to know. I told him that we were just here for a visit, making the same assurances about keeping the name of the place a secret. I apologized for scaring the shopkeepers and asked for his help. Outside his office, bearded old men were engaged in a furious argument, and all of them were waiting for a chance to meet with the magistrate. Their shouts came through the window; every so often Hajji Abdul looked out to make sure they weren't killing each other.

Hajji Abdul wanted to explain the existence of the market, which operated in his jurisdiction with his tacit approval. "The market belongs to this area. The people are poor and have no jobs. They are doing this for money because there are no factories or places for them to work. If there were such places, they wouldn't grow it," Hajji Abdul said. I got the feeling that he felt a little ashamed of the business but felt that the people were more or less forced into the drug trade. "We allowed opium because the people only have a small amount of land, and if they grew food on it, they wouldn't have enough money to live."

The BBC claimed that Karzai's opium ban "renewed an order issued by the Taliban authorities two years ago" which was "strictly enforced." But Hajji Abdul talked of how the real business of the Taliban was opium growing, and how they had gone before the United Nations and said they were against drugs, but in fact had gone to the sellers and told them to do a brisk business, taking 10 percent of their profits as a tax, or zakat. Then a strange thing happened. Hajji Abdul offered to take us back to the market with his fighters, saying they would open it for us. It sounded like a bad plan but it had that weird momentum, and I was still very curious about the bazaar. In front of the police station, seven mujahedin piled into the back of a pickup and led our car through a break in the village wall, down a secret path. When we arrived, sellers were still milling around, looking intensely peeved. The stores were still shut. When the sellers got a look at the magistrate's men, everyone seemed to relax. The truth is that the local authorities protect the market, so anybody arriving with the cops gets the green light. A seller opened his shop for me and I sat on his floor with him in the dark and asked him about business. Who were the buyers? "All of them are Pakistanis. They come peacefully, only taking what they need," the bazaari said. Once the biscuits are bought, they travel to Ali Masjid in Pakistan where they are then refined into heroin. "How is the product moved around so easily?" I wanted to know. "Big officers in the Pakistani intelligence services [ISI] are involved in the shipment of heroin to Europe and the United States," the seller explained. "ISI narcotics and the FIA are the big ones." For every kilo of opium biscuits (in the market, a kilo is a generous 1,200 grams) the sellers get about $150. My new friend's 10 kilogram plastic bag of resin, worth about $1,500, a fortune in Afghanistan, will become one kilogram of pure heroin in Ali Masjid, worth a fortune anywhere. The Afghans can't give it up, and often it's the cash crop grown by doctors and engineers who haven't been paid for months.

"We don't have facilities to make heroin here," the seller pointed out, placing the blame for the drug problem in Pakistan's court. Heroin didn't seem like something he was eager to get into.

On our way up to the village we had seen convoys of trucks and cab from the Torkham border headed to the market, a steady flow of hundreds of buyers who will return to Pakistan the same day.

An early story in the road series, the Opium Men was originally published in Salon.com. I was able to learn from poppy farmers some of the details of the drug trade in Afghanistan. As I was reporting the piece, a line of cars from Pakistan delivered buyers to the market. The Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan is where a great deal of the opium is refined into heroin. Ultimately, Pakistani middlemen export the heroin to markets in Europe and the United States.

LEAD IMAGE: November, 2001, Taloqan, Afghanistan. An old fortune teller in the market making a prediction.
Photo: Phillip Robertson

While much of the coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan follows the politics of superpowers and insurgencies, not enough has been written about the dynamics of drug smuggling in the region. The tribal areas of Pakistan are a law unto themselves, and there are real economic reasons why the tribes do not want to live under the writ of the Pakistani government. If the drug trade is disrupted, there are rich businessmen and tribal figures who stand to lose a great deal of money.

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