The U. Rather than declining in that time, poppy acreage more than tripled. The counternarcotics campaign was driven by the belief that the Taliban was filling its coffers with taxes levied along the opium supply chain.
One U. But experts say those numbers are vastly overstated. The Taliban relies more on taxing ordinary goods such as fuel and cigarettes. The distinction matters, experts say, because blaming the Taliban for perpetuating the drug trade ignores the weak governance, lack of security and poverty that play larger roles in driving farmers to grow poppy. Doctors, judges, athletes, activists: Afghan women trapped and considered at-risk under Taliban rule.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women who fear being targeted for their work see dwindling hope of escape. Those drugs have already made inroads in North America.
Synthetic opioids are far more dangerous. Heroin is the lesser evil. Felbab-Brown said there is precedent for a country eradicating its opium trade: Thailand. Starting in the late s, the Southeast Asian nation was able to reduce its opium footprint by providing poppy growers alternative jobs. Replicating that success will be difficult in Afghanistan. Thailand had the benefits of peace, a rapidly industrializing economy and a far smaller opium trade to start with.
Yet these pledges seem simply a ploy by new Taliban leaders to look more moderate. Mujahid has not yet explained how the Islamist group will ban opium, a key resource for them. In the meantime, the Taliban realize that promising to ban heroin could secure international support , according to Jonathan Goodhand, an expert in international drug trade at the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS at the University of London.
Read more: Afghanistan: what the conflict means for the global heroin trade. Controlling the country will also offer the Taliban access to airlines, the state bureaucracy and banks, facilitating the opium trade and money-laundering. As the Taliban, warlords and corrupt public officials vie for drug profits and power, it will fuel even more instability in the country. Drug addiction in Afghanistan is an ignored but growing epidemic. As the United States wraps up its longest war, Afghanistan remains the world's biggest illicit opiate supplier and looks certain to remain so as the Taliban is on the brink of taking power in Kabul, said current and former U.
The latest from Afghanistan. Widespread destruction during the war, millions uprooted from their homes, foreign aid cuts, and losses of local spending by departed U. That dependence threatens to bring more instability as the Taliban, other armed groups, ethnic warlords, and corrupt public officials vie for drug profits and power.
Some U. With the insurgents entering Kabul on Sunday, "these are the best moments in which these illicit groups tend to position themselves" to expand their business, Gudes said. The Taliban banned poppy growing in as they sought international legitimacy, but faced a popular backlash and later mostly changed their stance, according to experts.
Asked for comment, a State Department official said the United States would continue to support the Afghan people, "including our ongoing counternarcotics efforts," but declined to say how aid would continue should U. While it's impossible to pinpoint just how profitable the opium economy is to the Taliban, over the last two decades, estimates have ranged from the tens of millions to low hundreds of millions.
Beyond those figures it's really just "fantasy," she said. At the beginning of the US-led invasion in , British coalition forces were tasked with developing a counternarcotics policy, but around , the US muscled its way in, Felbab-Brown said, pushing for a more aggressive eradication effort. That included aerial crop spraying, a campaign from to that infuriated some Afghan communities and damaged relations between Kabul and Washington.
But the data to support that claim was disputed, and American policy flip-flopped throughout administrations and departments during the year war.
Prior to , the US strategy on drugs was viewed as an "uncoordinated effort [that was] ineffective and in need of significant changes," the SIGAR report said. State was trying to eradicate, USAID was marginally trying to do livelihoods, and DEA was going after bad guys," one senior Department of Defense official was quoted as saying in the report.
In , however, poppy production spiked, leading to some officials calling for a stronger eradication campaign. Robert Charles, the then-assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, testified that spring that there are "no more urgent and fundamental issues than the drug situation, which if left unchecked, will become a cancer that spreads and undermines all we are otherwise achieving in the areas of democracy, stability, anti-terrorism and rule of law.
An Afghan soldier walks through a field of poppies during an eradication campaign in Kandahar province's Maiwand district in In , however, the late US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke called the US eradication program "the least effective program ever.
That same year, under the Obama administration, the US scaled back poppy eradication attempts. However, they struggled to effectively implement an "alternative livelihoods" approach -- a program that incentivized governors in poppy-free provinces and encouraged farmers to grow other crops, such as saffron.
The mission was unsuccessful, with experts concluding they'd largely targeted empty compounds owned by local traders -- at the cost of numerous civilian casualties. An Afghan worker pours gasoline on a large pile of illegal drugs that were destroyed in September in Kabul.
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