Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium. In 2020, opium poppy was grown on some 224,000 hectares, one of the highest levels of cultivation in the country
According to a recent Associated Press report, the Taliban, who now rule Afghanistan uncontested, have set their sights on stamping out narcotics addiction, even if by force. It describes the Taliban fighters scouring the streets of Kabul, locating drug addicts, and bringing them to de-addiction facilities. The report quotes Qari Ghafoor, the lead patrol officer in a raid the AP covered, as saying, “This is just the beginning, later we will go after the farmers, and we will punish them according to Sharia law.” This is in keeping with Vanda Felbab-Brown’s statement in her article, Pipe dreams: The Taliban and drugs from the 1990s into its new regime, that after toppling the Ashraf Ghani Government in August this year, the Taliban had announced their intention to rid Afghanistan of drugs. She had added that interlocutors had mentioned the same objective in conversations with her in the winter of 2019.
The matter is important. Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium. In 2020, opium poppy was grown on some 224,000 hectares, one of the highest levels of cultivation in the country. Will the Taliban actually crack down? For an answer, one has to look at the history of their links with poppy cultivation and drug production and trafficking. As Felbab-Brown points out, their original impulse was to ban it as they considered drug production to be anti-Islamic. They did so as they moved out in late 1994 and early 1995 from Kandahar in the West to Helmand Valley, Afghanistan’s main poppy growing region. This reduced the area under poppy cultivation by half because farmers feared reprisal from the Taliban and wheat prices were booming.
By 1996, the Taliban, in a new approach, began taxing farmers and traffickers and protecting the latter. Its position now was such that the cultivation and trade of cannabis was forbidden, as was the manufacture of heroin and consumption of opiates. Production and trade of opium was not. Poppy production continued to increase. The total production of opium, 200 tonnes in 1980, rose to 1,600 tonnes in 1990, and 3,400 tonnes in 1994, and then, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction’s report, “Counternarcotics: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan” (June, 2018), almost doubled from 2,248 tonnes in 1996 to 4,565 tonnes in 1999.
A dramatic volte face followed. On July 28, 2000, Taliban supremo Mullah Omar, banned the cultivation and trafficking of opium and repeated the announcement in October. Perhaps the intention was to build bridges with the US and the West after the 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1267 had imposed severe sanctions against them. They might also have wanted the move to drive up global prices steeply and sell their inventory at a higher profit. Whatever the reason, it led to the most successful poppy eradication programme in Afghanistan’s history. According to the records of the US military, poppy farming declined by 99 per cent in Taliban-controlled areas, eliminating almost three-fourths of the world’s heroin supply. This, however, alienated the farmers, who had become attracted to poppy cultivation because of its profitability and relative ease. According to many, they consequently supported the US-led invasion launched on October 7, 2001, and ousted the Taliban from power.
The Taliban learnt their lesson. Instead of trying to curb the cultivation of poppy and the production of drugs, they chose to profit from both during their post-defenestration drive for power. In her paper “How Opium Profits the Taliban, Gretchen Peters estimated that in 2008, the Taliban had collected $50 million as Ushr and $125 million by taxing drug laboratories producing heroin and morphine base. She adds, “The Taliban rakes in as much as $250 million more every year providing armed protection for drug shipments moving through their control zones. They also receive tens of millions of dollars’ worth of material supplies, including vehicles, food, and satellite phones.”
Later, in a 2012 report, the UN Security Council’s Taliban Sanctions Monitoring Committee cited the Afghan Government’s estimate that the Taliban earned approximately $100 million from the illicit narcotics trade that year. Subsequently, according to Jonathan Landay’s report “Profits and poppy, Afghanistan’s illegal drug trade a boon for Taliban,’ (Reuters, August 15, 2021), UN officials have said that the Taliban are likely to have earned more than $400 million between 2018 and 2019 from the drug trade. A May 2021 US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) report quoted a US official estimating that the Taliban derive up to 60 per cent of their annual revenue from illicit narcotics.
Drug money played an important role in the Taliban’s rise to power and some of its leaders have been personally on the take. Would they give it up? Would they not try to use drug money to finance factional violence among themselves if these break out? Will they risk a revolt by farmers at a time when the Islamic State of Khorasan has launched a fierce offensive against them?. To all appearances their current anti-drug posture is to gain international recognition as well as aid they need badly.
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal.)
