A friend of the blog recently requested some sources on drug trafficking in Central Asia so here’s what I’ve got. Feel free to tack on any additional info in the comment section.

1. Regional Background:

Rediscovering Central Asia, S. Frederick Starr. Essential cultural and historical background.

This vast region of irrigated deserts, mountains, and steppes between China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the Caspian Sea is easily dismissed as a peripheral zone, the “backyard” of one or another great power. [...] By and large, most people abroad ignore the land of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni, dismissing it as an inconvenient territory to be crossed while getting somewhere else.

Central Asia Human Development Report (2005), UNDP. At 268 pages, this monster will tell you most everything you need to know about economic and social conditions in Central Asia:

Few parts of the world are as interdependent as the five Central Asian landlocked countries. The five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—are more distant from the nearest seaports than any other countries in the world. Especially for the smaller states, land transit routes represent irreplaceable economic lifelines. The Central Asian republics are also bound together by their water and energy endowments, with upstream countries holding some of the world’s largest freshwater reserves, and downstream countries containing important fossil fuel resources. While the latter depend upon their upstream neighbours for irrigating water-intensive cotton production, the upstream countries depend equally on their downstream neighbours for their energy needs.

Drug Trafficking on the Great Silk Road: The Security Environment in Central Asia (1999), Martha Brill Olcott and Natalia Udalova. An interesting pre-9/11 report (AKA back when we thought all drugs came from South and Central America) on how drug trafficking developed in the region.

The drug problem is still a relatively new one for the Central Asian region. Until the last years of communist rule, drug use in the Soviet Union was nowhere near as wide-spread as it was in the West. In fact, official propaganda portrayed addiction to drugs as a “capitalist disease” that could not spread to the socialist world. All data concerning drug trade and the number of drug addicts was classified and considered to be a state secret, making it almost impossible to estimate the number of drug addicts in the USSR. The beginning of the war in Afghanistan, however, changed the status quo, since many of the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan got addicted to opiates. They also established business relations with the Afghan drug producers, some of whom continue to serve as a source of the present expanded drug trade.

Read more after the jump ---->

2. Understanding the Source:

Afghanistan Opium Survey (2009), UNODC. All the data on Afghani opium production you could ever want:

In 2009, opium cultivation in Afghanistan decreased by 22%, from 157,000 hectares (ha) in 2008 to 123,000 ha today. In Helmand alone, cultivation declined by a third, to less than 70,000 ha. Indeed, the major drop in Helmand corresponds to the entire national decline this year: -34,000 ha. The dramatic turn-around in Helmand can be attributed to an effective mix of sticks and carrots: governor leadership; a more aggressive counternarcotics offensive; terms of trade more favourable to legal crops; and the (related) successful introduction of food zones to promote licit farming

(Also check out the UNODC's 2010 Winter Rapid Response Assessment)

Financing the Taliban (2010), Catherine Collins and Ashraf Ali

The drug trade is the most obvious example of the regional nature of the Taliban’s fundraising. The group is strongest in southern Afghanistan, its traditional home and the part of the country that produces most of the country’s opium poppies, which provide 90 percent of the world’s heroin. Ties between the Taliban and the traffickers have become close in recent years, which means going after drug trafficking is essential to reducing the money available to the insurgents. The financial picture is different in the eastern part of the country, where poppy production is far smaller.

3. How Trafficking Works in Central Asia:

Illicit Drug Trend in Central Asia (2008), UNODC. If you only have time to read one article from this list, read this one. Great maps, charts, etc. 

Large volume controlled deliveries carried out within and through the region have provided an early indication that organized criminal groups may be a new composite element in Central Asia’s hitherto unstructured drug trade. Transporting shipments of up to 500kg of drugs involves
significant financial resources beyond the reach of small traffickers. The second indicator is the flow of precursors through Central Asia. Because these chemicals must be shipped in large quantities, a level of organization and sophistication of traffickers is required to traffic them. Indeed, many of the techniques used by small scale traffickers such as swallowing, intra-cavity concealment, or pack mule transport, are simply not possible for precursor trafficking. The need to use main roads and official border crossings, in turn, necessitates networks of corrupt border guards or the capacity to make fraudulent documents.

Drug Trafficking as a Challenge for Russia’s Security and Border Policies (2008) Serghei Golunov. The problem from a Russian perspective:

"The Silk Route" attracts drug smugglers by transparency of the most post-Soviet borders, possibilities to use clan and ethnic ties for criminal operations in these states, the biggest in Europe capacity of Russia's heroin market, and by absence of serious competition to opiates from cocaine or synthetic drugs. However, the use of "the Northern route" for more solvent EU market is hampered with longer distance, more middlemen on the way, enough strict migration regime that EU established for the citizens of the CIS countries. That is why citizens of EU states themselves, especially of the countries (Lithuania, Poland and others) recently joined the EU, played great part in drug-trafficking from the post-Soviet space westwards1 . Thus, the Northern route is used more frequently for supplies of opiates to Russian and most post-Soviet countries' markets while to the EU states the most of heroin is transported mainly through the Balkan route.

Illicit Drug Trafficking and Islamic Terrorism as Threats to Russian Security (2005), Ekaterina Stepanova. This article helps to explain the often complicated links between Islamist groups and the drug business in Central Asia:

Large-scale illicit drug trafficking is the single most critical security threat the situation in Central Asia poses for Russia today. The drug trafficking of the region should by no means be associated primarily or solely with armed opposition groups. Most professional criminal groups operate independently from them, and the drug business is generally apolitical in the sense that it as easily co-opts corrupted parts of the state apparatus as it cooperates with militant opposition groups. Still, the very close nexus between terrorism and crime in the region poses a threat that is twice as hard to confront.