The Rape of Kunar

The Kunar Forest, one of Afghanistan's national treasures, has been devastated by timber thieves who have stripped it of nearly half its viable stocks and shipped the booty to Pakistan for export to the Gulf and Europe.

It is a problem that has long afflicted other woodlands around the country. War and poverty fuelled the trade at first, but the fall of the Taleban, who at least controlled it, has resulted in a massive expansion in the timber thieves' activity.

"According to our last survey, in May 2001, as much of 48 per cent of the Kunar Forest may have been ruined," said the assistant director of the Afghan NGO Protect the Environment, ADA, Gul Agha Ahmadi. "Since then the problem can only have got worse."

As in so many other matters, the interim authority is powerless to stop the thieves, who predictably have the protection of the tribal and political warlords who run much of rural Afghanistan.

The forest was freely plundered in the years following the fall of the Afghan communist regime in 1988, while their victorious enemies from the Mujaheddin fought amongst themselves in a bitter civil war. Then, in 1994 came the Taleban.

"No one was surprised by the looting and destruction during the rule of the Mujaheddin," said Ahmadi. "Life was cheap and people did not know how else to survive.

"People expected the Taleban to save the forests as it is a religious duty. But instead they actually made it easier (for the timber thieves) by opening up roads to the forest on the pretext of clearing old cut trees. It only cleared the way for locals to cut down even more trees and export the timber abroad."

The trade was exceptionally profitable for the Taleban. An ADA expert, engineer Sher Ahmed, said they organised it carefully. The Taleban sealed off all but one of the roads from the forest to the Pakistani border and forced the loggers on a huge 800-km detour from Kunar province, on Afghanistan's eastern border, to a crossing in the south.

"Trucks would go from the capital of Kunar province, Chagha Sarai, via Kabul, Ghazni, Khandahar and finally into Pakistan at the Chaman crossing. And from there to Dubai, the Gulf and eventually Europe.

"The Taleban took 28,000 Pakistani rupees in duty (460 US dollars) from just one truck on the Chaman border near Khandahar. Three hundred trucks a day were making the same journey at that time."

Ahmed says the Taleban were loath to give this income up, despite orders from the student militia's spiritual leader Mullah Omar. "He called for a stop to the logging many times, but the order was not carried out. Yet when he ordered the destruction of the giant Buddha statues of Bamyan, this was carried out in three days," he said.

The fall of the Taleban brought an end to even this limited control of the trade. By March 2001, the snows had cleared and the loggers were once more free to operate and able to take the wood down well-cleared roads to the border crossing a short drive away.

The woodlands have been divided between local groups and their Pakistani partners and today scores of trucks are crossing the frontier daily into Pakistan. "It is depressing to think of the Pakistani traders just buying all our forests," said the tribal elder of Sarkani district in Kunar. "They get the advantage, not the Afghans."

The Kunar Forest that gives the province its name is the largest woodland in the border territory, but other forests in the region have also been hit - such as the Korangal, split into five giant woods near the town of Paich.

Elsewhere in the country, the timber thieves are at work in the border provinces of Paktia, Ghor and the beautiful Speen Ghar (White Mountains) of Nangarhar.

Kunar provincial governor and regional military leader Jandad Khan doesn't believe there's a problem. Like the Taleban before him, he claimed that the trade was just in old wood cleared from the forest and that new trees were not being illegally logged.

"It is true that the logging is a great loss both to Kunar and Afghanistan," he told IWPR, "but the wood being removed now was partly cut in the Taleban time. It is being taken from small forest areas, divided by arrangement by the local people themselves and sold to Pakistani traders. That's why we are allowing them to cut and carry."

The director of the province's forestry department, Abdul Hashim, is far more concerned, but powerless to do anything about the problem. "It may be true that the wood was illegally cut and sold before, but that doesn't mean that that crime should be followed by another. The locals sell this wood illegally, but it is the Pakistani traders who should really be made to pay."

However, he has no means to prevent the timber thefts. "Neither I nor my department have the authority to ban this trade. It's organised between the local people and the traders. No one listens to anything we say."

ADA's Ahmadi agrees, "We tried very hard to convince the local people that the forest is part of the national wealth but they won't accept what we say. We complained to the agriculture ministry as well but they have no authority here.

"They keep talking aimlessly on the radio about the government of the nation. But in Kunar everyone is king and does whatever he wants."

Daud Wafa is a freelance journalist in Kabul.