High Times on the Silk Road: The Central Asian Paradox

In medieval times, traders carried jewels, spices, perfumes, and fabulous fabrics along the legendary Silk Route through Central Asia. Today, the goods are just as valuable, but infinitely more dangerous. Weapons and equipment for American troops in Afghanistan travel from west to east, along the vital lifeline of the Northern Supply Route. In the other direction, an unadvertised, but no less deadly product travels along the same roads, generating billions of dollars in illicit profits. As much as 25 percent of Afghanistan’s heroin production is exported through the former Soviet states of Central Asia, and the UN’s drug experts express grave concerns. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime (unodc), claims that the “Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world’s most strategic, yet volatile regions.” A report from his office asserts that there is a “perfect storm spiraling into Central Asia” with drug trafficking funding terrorist groups and insurgency, fostering instability and conflict, and leaving a host of health problems behind. This should be a wake-up call to Central Asian governments. Yet, oddly, nobody seems to care very much.

In theory, the United Nations is right to be worried. At first glance, drug trafficking seems like a major threat to the region, since it is so inextricably linked to violent crime and political instability in many other parts of the world. More people died in Mexican drug violence in 2009 than in Iraq. In Brazil, the government admits about 23,000 drug-related homicides each year—some ten times the number of civilians killed in the war in Afghanistan. And it’s not just Latin America that suffers. On Afghanistan’s border with Iran, there are regular clashes between Iranian counter-narcotics units and drug smugglers. Hundreds of border guards have been killed over the past decade in fights with heroin and opium traffickers.

But Central Asia’s drug trade looks rather different. A closer look reveals a murky world of corruption and official protection, with three strange and paradoxical outcomes.

Three Paradoxes

A Taliban prohibition on heroin production in 2000 was remarkably successful, reducing exports from the Afghan territories they controlled in 2001 to almost zero. But after the U.S.-led invasion, the Taliban gave up their apparently principled stance against drugs, and reverted to an earlier position—demanding a tax from both farmers and traffickers, and sometimes providing logistical support and protection for cross-border smuggling, under the profitable rationale that it was non-believers who used the drugs. Production rocketed again, and exports through Central Asia also shot up. The United Nations and other experts expected an accompanying rise in drug-related violence, but the reality was far different. There are no drug-related shoot-outs on the leafy streets of Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. Drug gangs in Tajikistan do not shoot down police helicopters, as they did recently in Rio. In fact, as the volume and value of heroin transported through the region has risen, the level of drug-related crime has fallen.

In Tajikistan, drug-related crime (covering everything from low-level possession to trafficking) plummeted after 2001, from 1,949 cases to a remarkably low 726 cases in 2006. This left UN experts puzzled. “Given Tajikistan’s position as the drug gateway to Central Asia,” they wrote in a recent report, “it is peculiar that drug-related crime and convictions are the lowest in Central Asia.” But these declines post-2001 are not confined to Tajikistan. The same hold true across all Central Asian states. Even where low-level drug crimes are uncovered, major trafficking figures are almost never arrested or charged. This suggests the first paradox. The more drugs are trafficked through Central Asia, the lower the level of drug-related crime.

The available statistics also point to a second paradox. While opium and heroin production in Afghanistan has increased markedly since the mid-1990s, and export through Central Asia has probably increased proportionately more than production, drug seizures of opium by...