No matter who's been in power, Afghanistan's opium trade
has continued to rise.
The result? Today, Afghanistan supplies 80% of the world's
black market opiates.
At its peak, the opium trade was just over 7% of Afghanistan's GDP.
For comparison, at the height of Colombia's drug trade in the 1980s,
cocaine accounted for 6% of the country's GDP.
Both the Taliban and the U.S.
have, at different times, tried to end Afghanistan's opium trade,
but all their efforts ultimately failed.
So why does business for the opium trade keep booming regardless of who's in power?
And why do narcotics have such a stranglehold on Afghanistan's economy?
This is the poppy plant.
Inside its seed pods is a sap-like substance known as opium.
Once opium is extracted, it can be refined into morphine,
which can then be used to produce drugs like heroin and codeine.
The poppy plant has grown in Afghanistan for centuries,
thanks to a hospitable geography and climate. For most of recorded history,
however, opium extraction played a minor role in Afghanistan's agriculture,
especially when compared to neighboring countries like Iran.
But starting with the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, armed groups
ravaged Afghanistan's countryside, destabilizing its rural economy.
This instability is part of
what made the profitable opium trade more attractive to struggling farmers
and made the poppy plant an integral part of the rural economy.
You cannot undermine that economy
without undermining the livelihoods of a significant number of people
who live in rural areas,
particularly in the southwest,
but in other parts of Afghanistan as well.
A recent U.S. report estimated that the Taliban derives
as much as 60% of its income from illegal narcotics.
However, David Mansfield, a leading expert
on Afghanistan's drug trade,
disputes this data.
So opium has been a source of finance
for the Taliban, but it hasn't
been the most important source of finance.
80% of the Taliban's revenue was derived from the cross-border trade
in legal goods, the mundane, the cigarettes, the tires, the car parts, the fuel.
That's how they earned their money.
A much smaller part,
9%, was on drugs:
opiates, methamphetamine.
So it's a much less significant
part of the revenue stream.
But nevertheless,
it's an important rural constituency.
The Taliban's history with opium is, to say the least, complicated.
Before the Taliban came to power in the '90s,
they fought against former Mujahideen groups in the country's civil war.
These groups relied on opium as a source of income to fund their operations
and purchase weapons, a practice that started during the Soviet-Afghan war.
During that conflict, U.S.-backed
Mujahideen groups encouraged and pressured farmers to grow poppy plants.
Once the Taliban was fighting other Mujahideen groups in the 1990s,
it continued these practices, despite statements to the contrary.
When they took Kandahar in 1994,
they issued a promulgation there
that they would ban opium.
They never did.
When the Taliban took power in 1996, they actively permitted
the opium trade to keep the support of farmers and smugglers.
The result? Business boomed.
And in 1998, Afghanistan became the world's biggest opiate supplier.
But two years later, in a bid for international legitimacy and aid,
the Taliban banned opium.
These efforts were actually quite successful.
The U.N. estimated that the
Taliban's crackdown led to a 90%
decrease in opium production
between 2000 and 2001.
The move temporarily cut the global supply of heroin by two-thirds.
This success in eliminating opium production triggered a huge backlash
from poppy farmers, who plunged into debt after the ban.
The Taliban eventually rescinded the ban before the U.S. invaded.
But the political damage was already done.
Support for the Taliban had collapsed among its rural base.
After the U.S. invaded in 2001,
opium production spiked and quickly
returned to its previous heights.
The U.S., along with the rest of the international community,
made combating opium a major priority.
The United States spent $8.6 billion
between 2002 and 2017 on these counternarcotic efforts
while waging a war that devastated the rural areas of the country.
Some of this money went toward transportation infrastructure
and other economic investments.
The U.S. also paid farmers to grow crops, like wheat instead of poppies.
But these alternative crops were much less profitable for struggling farmers.
And farmers were still saying the same thing years later.
In 2018, Reuters reported that farmers who expected
to make $3,000 from an annual yield of poppy plants
would likely make less than $1,000 if they switched to wheat.
The U.S. also sprayed herbicide on poppy fields and even bombed
opium refining facilities.
These actions undermined support for the U.S.-aligned government in Kabul.
Ultimately, the Kabul government was only able to stamp out opium production
in the regions it controlled.
But there were still high demand for the drug from the global black market.
As a result, the price of opium shot up, making opium production
even more attractive to farmers who lived in regions outside Kabul's control.
And then, there was corruption.
U.S.-backed warlords and other officials maintained connections
to the drug trade, which undermined President Karzai's government in Kabul.
Karzai's efforts failed and the opium trade persisted,
impacting not just Afghanistan, but its neighboring countries.
Pakistan and Iran regularly report some of the world's largest
opiate seizures. And opiate addiction is more prevalent in Afghanistan,
Iran and Pakistan than any other region in the world.
Iran has long blamed Afghanistan's former government
and its NATO allies for failing to control the opium trade.
The bulk of seizures -
I mean, if you look, about 80% of opium,
morphine-based, heroin-based seizures
are made in Iran.
We even had situations
where they were using catapults to fire
the drugs over the Iranian border.
After retaking power in August 2021,
the Taliban pledged to ban the production and trade of drugs.
But this pledge isn't so simple.
I think their recent statement was,
you know, playing drugs politics.
There was a caveat in there
that, yes, we would like to ban opium,
but this would be in return
for international assistance.
Foreign aid accounted for about 43% of Afghanistan's GDP in 2020.
But now, that international aid is being replaced by sanctions and a U.S.
freeze on Afghanistan's central bank assets. And many farmers
say they can only make ends meet if they're able to grow poppies.
Your first day in the office,
you don't really try to alienate
your long-term supporters.
It's not a wise strategy.
We see absolute power.
That's for an external audience, is the projection of the appearance of power.
What domestically you see
is a process of negotiation where people go,
"Yeah, this is a deal that's been struck,
but next year is another year."
Going forward, the Taliban will also have to contend with another drug: meth.
Meth production in Afghanistan is
now exploding, thanks to the cultivation of naturally occurring ephedra plants
in the country's mountainous regions.
So somehow, we don't know how,
someone realized
that if you went into the mountains,
you'd find this crop, ephedra.
And you could turn that into methamphetamine.
More and more people
are going into the mountains,
harvesting the crop
and then selling it downstream
to these cottage industries in the southwest.
You know, some of the people who grow opium
are also producing this
cottage industry ephedrine.
The Taliban also faces a major threat in the form of ISIS-K,
the local offshoot of ISIS.
The group is vehemently against the opium trade
in keeping with their more hardline interpretations of Islamic law.
Ultimately, the future of opium might be out of the Taliban's hands.
I've sort of often looked
at the opium economy as,
it's like a broken tap, a broken faucet.
You can turn it off for a period of time,
but the washer's gone.
So eventually it starts to
drip, drip, drip, and then it starts to run.
So just because someone turns it off
for a period of time
because the conditions are right,
doesn't mean they can keep it off.