TAJIKISTAN….

With the West largely oblivious, new drug routes are emerging from Central Asia’s political turmoil. According to the anti-narcotics center in Russia’s ministry of internal affairs, there are at least seven laboratories producing heroin from locally cultivated poppies in northern Afghanistan, which lies outside Taliban control. Each of those labs produces 10 kilos (22 pounds) of heroin a day for shipment through Tajikistan into Russia. Perhaps ten percent of what crosses the Afghan-Tajikistan border is intercepted by the Russian border troops who patrol the region. Russia’s role in the trade is ambiguous. As a matter of grand strategy, Russia has an interest in prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan by helping the ethnic Tajiks in northern Afghanistan to continue their resistance to Taliban rule. On a plainer level, the Russians and Tajiks charged with securing the border with Afghanistan are poorly equipped and pervasively corrupt. This trade seems certain to grow.