Afghanistan: Banning Ammonium Nitrate by Dr. Jack Kem

On January 22, 2010, President Karzai published a decree that banned the use, production, storage or sale of ammonium nitrate – a fertilizer that has been used widely by the Taliban to produce IEDs. His decree also ordered the government to “train and equip Afghan police and custom officers within one month to detect and confiscate" the fertilizer within Afghanistan.

The use of ammonium nitrate, mixed with fuel oil, was the method used by Timothy McVeigh in 1995 for the Oklahoma City bombing that destroyed the Murrah Building. McVeigh used a 600-pound ammonium nitrate that resulted in killing 168 people. Ammonium nitrate was also used in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali in which 202 people died.

In November 2009, a major cache of ammonium nitrate was discovered in Kandahar. Dexter Filkins of the New York Times wrote a story entitled “Bomb Material Cache Uncovered in Afghanistan” on November 10, 2009 on the raids:

With fertilizer bombs now the most lethal weapons used against American and NATO soldiers in southern Afghanistan, the bomb-making operation in Kandahar was something close to astonishing. In a pair of raids on Sunday, Afghan police officers and American soldiers discovered a half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that is used in the overwhelming majority of homemade bombs here. About 2,000 bomb-making devices like timers and triggers were also found, and 15 Afghans were detained.

With a typical homemade bomb weighing no more than 60 pounds, the seizure of that much fertilizer — more than 10 tractor-trailer loads — removed potentially thousands of bombs from the streets and trails of southern Afghanistan, officials said. “You can turn a bag of ammonium nitrate into a bomb in a matter of hours,” said Col. Mark Lee, who leads NATO’s effort to stop the bomb makers in southern Afghanistan. “This is a great first step.”

Concerning the recent announcement banning ammonium nitrate, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Alan Cullison and Yaroslav Trofimov entitled “Karzai Bans Ingredient of Taliban's Roadside Bombs” on January 22, 2010:

The Afghan government banned ammonium nitrate fertilizers, the key ingredient of roadside bombs that have emerged as the deadliest weapon used by Taliban fighters against NATO troops in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has been seizing the fertilizer on its own since summer, has identified the primitive, fertilizer-packed roadside bomb as the weapon of choice of Taliban insurgents. Commanders say it could be as crucial to the Taliban as the surface-to-air missile was to the Afghan mujahedeen warriors in their fight in the 1980s against the Soviets.

Troops have been discovering ever-larger caches of the fertilizer in recent months—a possible clue, NATO officials say, that militants plan to use the material as a centerpiece of their strategy this year. The Taliban have used improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, with increasingly deadly effect as the insurgency has picked up steam and the militants have become more sophisticated in their execution. IEDs killed 20 of the 32 of the coalition troops who died in the first weeks of January. Almost all of the bombs were made from nitrate fertilizer.

President Hamid Karzai, in a decree issued Friday, banned the use, production, storage or sale of ammonium nitrate, and gave Afghans 30 days to turn over any supplies to authorities. He also ordered government ministries to "train and equip Afghan police and custom officers within one month to detect and confiscate" any of the fertilizer in the country or at its borders.

The Wall Street Journal article also states that “NATO estimates that as little as 5% of the nitrate fertilizer entering Afghanistan goes to legitimate use.” As a result, the ban on ammonium nitrate should have a negligible impact on agriculture in Afghanistan. The Boston Globe published an Associate Press Story by Amir Shah and Robert H. Reed on January 23, 2010 entitled “Afghanistan bans fertilizer used in bombs: Aims to reduce Taliban’s access to chemical” that reported on how the ban is being perceived by farmers in Afghanistan:

Mir Dad Panjshiri, an official in the Afghan Agriculture Ministry, said the government had been discouraging the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer for years because urea fertilizer is better suited to Afghan soils. He said businessmen began importing ammonium nitrate fertilizer in large amounts last year, mostly from Central Asia and Pakistan. “We detected an increase in the use of the fertilizer over the past year by poor farmers in the southern provinces,’’ Panjshiri said. “It’s not available everywhere. These poor farmers didn’t know what they bought.’’

He said the government was confident it could enforce the ban on its northern borders with Central Asia, but “my concern is more in the south because we have a long border with Pakistan and it’s available there.’’

…Nevertheless, some farmers said they preferred ammonium nitrate fertilizer and expressed frustration over the ban. “If the government and NATO forces want to stop fertilizer which they think is used in explosives, they should invest money and make a deal with some other country to import good quality fertilizers,’’ said Ezatullah, a farmer from Kandahar Province who like many Afghans uses only one name. “We haven’t received any improved seeds or fertilizers. We are not happy.’’

The new ban on ammonium nitrate won’t completely eliminate IED’s but will make them more difficult to manufacture – a welcome step towards protecting coalition troops and the Afghan people.