In August and September,
as the last American troops pulled out of Afghanistan,
and the Taliban swept back into power,
the world looked on in shock.
Just hours ago, the last American troops left Afghanistan.
The Taliban now claims to have complete control of the country.
Desperate people pour onto the runway,
trying to flee the country
in what can only be described as a chaotic exodus.
After 20 years, trillions of dollars,
thousands of American casualties,
and hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Afghans,
it was hard not to wonder what had actually been achieved.
And in Afghanistan, America was defeated
as much by the international drug laws it helped to create
as by any rebel group or militant ideology.
This is how the illegal heroin trade
has fundamentally reshaped Afghanistan as a country for 40 years
and how you can’t understand the American failure there without it.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[HEROIN IN AFGHANISTAN]
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
In response, the CIA sent money, weapons, and support
to various Afghan resistance groups, known collectively as the mujahideen.
One of the main ways the militants financed their war effort
was through the opium trade.
They are the force of resistance to Soviet occupation.
They subsist on support from the people
and an unshakable comradeship.
Even on the battlefield,
they call their struggle jihad— the holy war.
The brutal war with the Soviets
killed about 10 percent of Afghanistan’s population
and virtually destroyed the economy.
It looked perhaps as much as 1 billion people who died
in those 40 years of the war,
so a devastating experience for Afghanistan
in which agriculture is still in tatters
and poppy is expanding.
Desperate farmers turned to growing opium,
which was by far the most valuable cash crop available.
And the mujahideen raised money through taxing them
and by using their weapons and cross-border networks in Pakistan
to become drug traffickers themselves.
By 1984, Afghanistan was supplying 60 per cent of the US heroin market
and 80 per cent of the European.
When it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.
And even as Nancy Reagan was doing “Just Say No” infomercials back home,
the CIA knew exactly how deep their new allies were in the opium trade,
but chose to turn a blind eye.
The international community has been steadfast
in its support of the Afghan cause,
and this certainly has been true for the United States.
Soviet forces finally left Afghanistan in 1989,
at which point the country dissolved into civil war
as various mujahideen factions and warlords battled for control.
But by now, opium was well-established
as by far the best way to finance any paramilitary campaign,
and this civil war became
as much a battle to control the drug trafficking supply lines
as anything else.
Then, in 1996, the Taliban—
a fundamentalist mujahideen faction backed by Pakistan—
took control.
This was a bit awkward,
as Islam prohibits all forms of intoxication,
but a huge section of the Afghan economy
was by now completely reliant on the opium trade.
So the Taliban cooked up a religious ruling
that it was OK for Afghans to grow opium
to sell to foreign infidels...
as long as they weren’t taking it themselves.
This bit of convenient religious hypocrisy
meant that during the first three years of Taliban rule,
Afghanistan accounted for about 75 percent of global heroin supply.
The whole supply chain was pretty well taken care of for opium.
The Taliban actually had sort of a agricultural extension tech program
that they could provide loans for growing opium,
and they could help with collecting it
and transporting it away.
This went on for about three years.
Then the war on drugs got involved.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
offered the Taliban a degree of international legitimacy—
plus hundreds of millions of dollars in support—
if they cracked down on opium production.
But despite various drug warriors at the time
claiming this reduction as a major achievement,
it was actually a total humanitarian disaster.
There were no reports of heroin users
suddenly stopping taking the drug,
but the heroin they were buying on the street
did get a lot less pure.
By mid-2002,
average heroin purity in the UK had dropped to 34 per cent,
leading to more people beginning to inject the drug
rather than smoke it.
In Iran, overdose deaths rose 60 percent
due to impurities in the supply.
And in India, users began supplementing the weaker gear
by injecting a pretty grim medication called Spasmo Proxyvon,
causing abscesses, gangrene, amputations, and rising deaths.
And the situation for Afghan farmers themselves
was arguably just as bad.
This poppy farmer says that people in Afghanistan are poor
because of over 20 years of war.
He says growing poppies
is the only way many people can survive.
One common solution was to abandon their farms
and move to Pakistan as refugees,
and then plant even more opium the following year,
or to sell their daughters to make up for lost income.
Obiadullah carefully tends to his poppy crops.
After all, they’re his lifeline.
He’s a landmine victim in Helmand province,
and with 13 children to feed, he’s steeped in debt.
He has already given away one 12-year-old daughter
to settle a loan.
Of course, the eradication of the global heroin trade
never happened,
nor did the Taliban gaining international acceptance.
What did happen was 9/11.
Today, our fellow citizens,
our way of life,
our very freedom came under attack
in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
Amid the chaos that followed the US invasion in 2001,
Afghan opium production roared back to life
from 180 tonnes in 2001,
to 3,000 in 2002,
to over 8,000 in 2007,
at that point providing 93 percent of the world’s heroin supply.
The years of US occupation
were the golden age of the Afghan heroin trade.
Only by now, the Taliban had learned its lesson,
and it was the NATO coalition’s moment to learn how useless
and self-defeating it is to try to eradicate the illegal drug business.
All you have to do is fly with them
over the opium heartland of Helmand Province
to see the impossible challenge they face—
the mile after mile of poppy fields in the early stage of cultivation.
Not only were Afghan farmers not getting anything really useful
in the way of advice or agricultural inputs from the Americans,
but then they started destroying the crop.
And farmers certainly saw that, “Ooh, they’re destroying the crops,
not only to hurt me, but I see that they picked me
because I’m supporting the wrong political faction.”
So this led to increased anger
against both the Americans and the Afghan government.
The Taliban insurgency had several sources of funding,
including donations from foreign sympathizers
and selling stolen NATO equipment.
But the opium trade was always amongst the most profitable,
often generating north of $400 million a year.
There’s no doubt that the bullets being fired at NATO forces
were being paid for by heroin sold on the streets of London
and Glasgow.
Obiadullah thinks the men who buy his poppies make medicine.
He doesn’t know that these crops
are responsible for heroin addiction across the world,
or that the drug trade supplies Taliban insurgents
with more than $150 million a year.
But the problem wasn’t only
that the Taliban was funding itself through opium.
It was that officials in the Western-backed Afghan government
also wanted in on that business
and became utterly corrupted by money from the illegal drug trade.
The policeman at the checkpoint was smoking weed,
which is kind of normal.
But two of the policemen filling sandbags now
are out of their brains on something else,
something stronger, opium or heroin,
literally nodding off as they stand up or sit down...
filling the sandbags.
When I was with the US Marine Corps
in southwestern Afghanistan back in 2012,
we learned that in the Afghan police,
part of the Ministry of the Interior,
people were paying $150,000
up through the Ministry of the Interior
to be appointed the chief of police
in a district out in the middle of the desert
in a mud-brick building...
where the opium trade was going through.
To many experts, the conflict in Afghanistan soon seemed to resemble
more a clash between rival drug cartels
fighting over supply chains
than a fight between a legitimate government
and a fundamentalist terror group.
And when the Taliban stepped up its attacks from 2015 onwards,
it’s no accident that those offensives began—
and were at their fiercest—
in areas crucial to the drug trade.
Two vehicles ahead are suspected of containing suicide bombers.
This very convoy has already dealt with a roadside bomb.
So now that the last US troops have gone
and the Taliban are back in control,
the big question is: what will happen to the opium trade?
Will the Taliban seek to crack down again
or will the international community
come at them with the full force of the war on drugs?
The Taliban has already announced
that it wants to ban opium poppy cultivation.
It might not be able to just lift the ban
and go back to cultivation
because the global drug trade is very different than in the 1990s.
And the big shock to the system is the emergence of synthetic opioids.
There’s a flood of fake prescription pills
that are laced with fentanyl or even pure fentanyl.
Over the years, we’ve been repeatedly told
that Afghanistan is America’s longest war.
This is obviously wrong.
The war on drugs has been going for 100 years
and has proved even more catastrophically destructive
and self-defeating than the quagmire in Afghanistan.
It was the war on drugs that made the war in Afghanistan unwinnable.
And now, if war on drugs policies are pursued in Afghanistan yet again,
the tidal wave of synthetic opioids that could follow
would likely kill more people
than any act of jihadist terrorism in history.