Alissa J. Rubin
New York Times News Service

NAKILABAD KALAY, Afghanistan – This stretch of the Helmand River Valley, the heart of the nation’s poppy-growing area, stands as a showcase for one of NATO’s most ambitious offensives against the Taliban and the drug trade. But now, the area is also becoming an object lesson in the resilience of militants and opium producers alike.

Beginning four years ago, a huge military offensive, first by British troops and then by U.S. Marines, broke the Taliban’s hold on much of the valley. At the same time, there was an all-out effort to educate farmers and encourage them to grow other crops, with the aim of cutting poppy production. The provincial governor reinforced this initiative with a tough eradication program in the land along the river.

Today, most farmers in this district, Nad Ali, as well as in nearby Marjah and other settlements along the river, grow wheat and cotton. The district governor just opened a school in this remote village, and there is a small bazaar with a handful of mud-walled shops doing a steady business in gum, candy and toiletries. Patrols by NATO troops, the Afghan army and the police are frequent.

Beyond the fertile river lands, however, a more troubling pattern is emerging. According to interviews with farmers, elders and Afghan and Western officials, the poor sharecroppers who used to farm poppy here have moved to the outer reaches of the district, turning the desert into remarkably productive opium fields. The Taliban have moved as well, evading the NATO offensive and offering the poppy farmers protection.

Over just a couple of seasons, these relocated farmers, unhampered by any military presence, have undercut the offensive’s initial gains against poppy production for this district. This, in turn, has raised hard questions about what will happen in villages like this one once the International Security Assistance Forces begin withdrawing.

“Four years ago, no one could stay here like these shopkeepers,” said an elderly man who refused to give his name, as he looked up from repairing a bicycle in the shadow of the thatch awning stretched just outside his little shop. “And when ISAF leaves, no one will be able to stay here.”

The pull of poppies is hard to resist. Despite NATO’s successes in balancing military saturation with agricultural incentives in Helmand, the province provides raw material for more than 40 per cent of the world’s opium, and overall poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2011 was up 7 per cent from the previous year. It is expected to rise further in the years ahead, both because opium prices are high and because the profitability of alternative crops is limited, in part by difficulties in marketing them, according to farmers and academics who study the poppy economy.

Poppy cultivation thrives on a combination of anti-government feeling, armed insurgency and government corruption. Counternarcotics experts describe a situation in which farmers looking to make money turn to the Taliban for protection. At the same time, the farmers resent the government for what they see as its hypocrisy in simultaneously pursuing eradication, which takes away the farmers’ livelihood, and being open to corruption, which allows those farmers who pay off government officials to continue growing poppies.

In Afghanistan, the developing politics and economics of opium production make it seem as if “you are in Colombia in the early stages, in Mexico in the early years,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who heads the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

He said that the Colombian FARC rebels started out as an ideological, anti-government movement, which was later taken over by financial interests. He described “collusion” among Helmand’s power brokers and the Taliban, who, for a price, protect the farmers from poppy eradication by government security officials. That has added to the sense that the government has little to offer – a feeling compounded by the lack of government services like schools or clinics in poppy-growing areas.

Nad Ali elders agree that the eradication effort is fostering a bond between poppy farmers and the insurgency.

“People who are living in areas where the government has control and where they don’t allow them to grow poppies, they don’t like the ban and they are going to areas where the Taliban have control,” said an elder from Nad Ali, who asked not to be named because he feared government reprisals. “There is nothing more important for people than poppies, and there is nothing more productive for people than poppies.”

The United Nations drug and crime office, as well as academic researchers who study poppy cultivation, say that in the desert areas where poppies are now grown, the Taliban made a strategic decision to refrain from charging the usual tax based on production amounts and are asking for smaller fees on farmers’ harvests.

The big profits do not go to the farmers or to the Taliban. The United Nations estimates that, of the total opium profits that remain in the country, about 10 per cent goes to the insurgents, 20 per cent to the farmers and the rest to the traffickers, the police, power brokers and those government officials who facilitate the transport out of the country.

“From the farmers on, there’s collusion,” said Lemahieu, referring to the payments the farmers and the traffickers make to protect the poppy crops.

Though poppy cultivation continues to flourish elsewhere, NATO has shown real progress in the Helmand River Valley in the area now called the food zone. Here, the poppy crop has been eliminated almost entirely, and the Taliban have had to relinquish their hold.

In the irrigated areas of Nad Ali, the British, who had military responsibility for Helmand until last year, distributed high-quality wheat seed to spur farmers to stop planting poppies.

The effort worked best among farmers who had well-irrigated land and were able to grow enough wheat that they could invest in secondary businesses in towns to augment their income, according to David Mansfield, a researcher at Tufts University who has tracked the rural livelihoods in Helmand province for more than a decade and recently published an exhaustive study of the province’s rural economy.

Helmand’s governor, Gulab Mangal, coupled the wheat seed distribution program with aggressive poppy eradication in the food zone, where Nakilabad Kalay is. By the second year, there were impressive results: a 33 per cent reduction in poppy cultivation in the food zone. But that trend diminished sharply in subsequent years, with only a 7 per cent reduction in 2010 and a 3 per cent reduction in 2011, according to statistics from the provincial reconstruction team in Helmand, suggesting that the alternative crop program’s effectiveness may have reached its limit.

While wheat pays relatively well, selling it can be a problem, several farmers in Nad Ali said. For poorer farmers, many of whom say they were sharecroppers when they worked land in the food zone, moving to the desert to grow poppies has meant they can afford to buy land since it is cheap, and they can feed their families better because they can earn more.

“People are committed to grow poppies, because there aren’t any other crops where we can make enough money to fill our children’s stomachs,” said Abdul Rauf, a farmer in the desert area of Nad Ali.