KABUL, Afghanistan — Mohammad Ibrahim was a typical defendant in Afghanistan’s drug court—a poor Pashtun farmer, caught smuggling about 55 pounds of opium in a woman’s bag to his house in the southern militant hot spot of Kandahar.
He said he didn’t know who paid for the poppies to be grown on his field, nor who moved them out of Afghanistan. He didn’t know Dari, the Afghan language spoken in the court. There were no witnesses, no evidence.
“Ibrahim, don’t you think that trafficking in drugs is a crime?” Judge Uzra Hassenzoi asked through a translator.
