Afghan poppy cultivation, which long provided most of the world’s heroin supply, flourished for decades due to US intervention in the country
The Taliban government of Afghanistan has carried out “truly unprecedented reductions in poppy cultivation” in 2023, according to a new analysis published by Alcis, a UK-based geographic information services firm specializing in geospatial data collection, statistical analysis and visualization.
The poppy reduction followed a ban on drugs in Afghanistan issued in April 2022 by Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah, only seven months after the Islamic movement took power following the August 2021 US military withdrawal from the country.
Alcis reports that an effective ban on poppy cultivation is in place and that opium production in 2023 will be negligible compared to 2022. High resolution imagery analyzed by the firm shows that in the province of Helmand, poppy cultivation was reduced from 120,000 hectares in 2022 to less than 1,000 hectares in 2023. This amounts to the largest reduction in poppy cultivation ever recorded in the country, including after the Taliban banned poppy production in 2000, one year before losing power following the 2001 US invasion.
As a result, wheat cultivation now dominates provinces in the south and southwest, where some 80% of Afghanistan’s total poppy crop had previously been grown.
The Taliban announced the ban on poppy cultivation in April 2022, but allowed the harvest of the poppy crop planted in the fall of 2021, fearing that banning or destroying it so close to the harvest season and after farmers had invested considerable time and resources in their poppy fields would provoke widespread unrest.
The Taliban then banned the planting of new poppy crops moving forward and destroyed any poppy fields planted after that time in violation of the ban.
Over the course of the summer of 2022, the Taliban also targeted the methamphetamine industry by destroying the ephedra crop and ephedrine labs across the country.
These findings were confirmed by journalists from the BBC, who traveled to Afghanistan this month while embedded with Taliban members destroying remaining poppy fields with sticks.
The BBC noted that the loss of supply of Afghan heroin may lead to increases in the “synthetic drugs, which can be far more nasty than opium,” among US and European drug users.
The BBC noted further that “opium was also grown freely in areas controlled by the US-backed former Afghan regime, something the BBC witnessed prior to the Taliban takeover in 2021.”
Indeed, the heroin trade has played a role in the conflicts plaguing the war-torn country since the 1970s.
In the late 1970s and in the 1980s, the CIA relied on Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and its Afghan mujahideen clients to wage war against the Soviet-backed Afghan government, and against Soviet forces which occupied the country in support of the government.
According to historian Alfred McCoy, the ISI, and mujahideen soon became key players in the burgeoning cross-border opium traffic.
McCoy writes that “The CIA looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew from about 100 tonnes annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tonnes by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60% of the US market and 80% of the European.”
McCoy writes further that, “Caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium – sometimes, reported the New York Times, ‘with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.’”
As reporting from journalist Gary Webb showed, the CIA was transporting weapons by plane to its proxy army in Nicaragua, the Contras, while the planes returned to the US loaded with cocaine, during this same period. Declassified US government documents later acknowledged that US officials relied on the drug trade to fund arms purchases for the Contras.
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was followed by years of chaos as warlords competed for control of the country. In 1996, the Taliban came to power and imposed a measure of order on the country. In 2000, the Islamic movement banned poppy production.
However, US forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and quickly toppled the Taliban. Poppy cultivation and the heroin trade flourished.
In 2004, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, reported that opium cultivation increased by two-thirds that year and had spread to all 32 provinces, “making narcotics the main engine of economic growth” in the country.
In 2010, a growing Taliban insurgency prompted President Obama to launch his Afghan surge, which sent an additional 17,000 US troops to the country. The surge was launched at Marja, a remote market town in Helmand province.
Alfred McCoy writes that, “As waves of helicopters descended on its outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of marines sprinted through fields of sprouting opium poppies toward the village’s mud-walled compounds. Though their targets were the local Taliban guerrillas, the marines were, in fact, occupying one of the capitals of the global heroin trade.”
McCoy noted further that the US-backed “Afghan army seemed to be losing a war that was now driven – in ways that eluded most observers – by a battle for control of the country’s opium profits. In Helmand province, both Taliban rebels and provincial officials are locked in a struggle for control of the lucrative drug traffic.”
As Simon Spedding of the University of South Australia observed, “The simple facts are that opium production was high under the US-influenced government of Afghanistan of the 1970s, decreased 10-fold by 2001 under the Taliban, and then increased 30-fold and more under the US to the same level as in the 1970s … These are facts, whereas the idea that the CIA runs opium from Afghanistan would be a conspiracy theory—unless, you thought about the United Nations statistics or happened to have been to Afghanistan.”
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