What is the Taliban's record? However, things have since changed. How does the Taliban make money from poppies? Afghanistan: How does the Taliban make money? But some experts dispute this figure. Where do the drugs end up?
Related Topics. Afghanistan Taliban Heroin Reality Check. Individual and collective interviews were carried out in a large number of households in order to analyse the constraints facing farmers, the strategies that they adopt, the principle factors which lead farmers to grow opium poppies and the conditions which would be necessary for them to stop or never start growing this crop. The priority needs of the targetted groups were identified via qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Opium poppy production in Afghanistan. The Taliban set up a one-toll system for trucks entering Afghanistan at Spin Boldak, patrolled the highway against other warlords, and, crucially, declared that the Taliban would not allow goods bound for Afghanistan to be carried out by Pakistani trucks, thus satisfying a key demand of the Afghan transport mafia.
Compared to the greedy and unpredictable local powerbrokers who had controlled and taxed the trafficking routes prior to the Taliban, the Taliban significantly lowered many transaction costs for the traffickers, preventing constant power shifts and bringing stability to the industry and helping to streamline it. When in late and early the Taliban moved out of Kandahar west to the Helmand Valley, the main poppy growing region in Afghanistan at the time, it banned the drug trade. The emergence of the Taliban on the political and military scene in the poppy growing regions halved the acreage allocated for poppy for the following growing season, a trend that farmers attributed to the fear of reprisals from the Taliban.
But wheat prices were also booming that year and there was a significant carry-over of raw opium from the bumper opium harvest in By , the Taliban adopted a laissez-faire approach to drug cultivation, that progressively evolved into taxing the farmers as well as providing security for and taxing the traffickers. The consumption of opiates is forbidden, as is the manufacture of heroin, but the production and trading in opium is not forbidden.
Thus, poppy cultivation continued increasing throughout the s. In , the total production of opium in Afghanistan consisted of metric tons.
By , it had climbed to 1, metric tons in , by to 3, metric tons in and 4, in Not only was this livelihood fairly lucrative, it was frequently the only source of livelihood available to the population in an otherwise devastated economy. All economic activity, short of subsistence production and the microeconomic spillover from illicit activities came to a halt. Moreover, as in the case of illicit smuggling of legal goods, the illicit narcotics economy also allowed other forms of microeconomic activity to develop in areas where there was previously only limited agricultural production.
Services, such as rest stops, teashops, and fuel stations sprung up in connection with the smuggling of narcotics. But unlike the smuggling of legal goods under ATTA, the illicit narcotics economy, being highly labor intensive, also provided a reliable, and frequently sole source of livelihood to the vast segments of the rural population.
The Taliban have brought us security so we can grow our poppy in peace. I need to grow poppy crop to support my 14 family members. We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan.
Yet in late , the Taliban did issue a ban on poppy cultivation that resulted in the largest reduction of opium poppy cultivation in a country in any single year. Cultivation fell from an estimated 82, hectares in to less than 8, in Unable to repay their debts, others were driven to borrow even further or abscond into Pakistan. While banning opium cultivation in , the Taliban did not ban or otherwise interfere with the sale and trafficking of opium and poppy during that period.
In choosing to curb the production, the Taliban risked its domestic political capital, based crucially on its sponsorship of the poppy economy, in the hope of obtaining international legitimacy.
Through the ban, the Taliban might have also sought to boost the price of opium and consolidate its control over the heroin trade. As cultivation exploded during the s, the farmgate prices for opium plummeted. The political costs to the Taliban, however, were substantial. Moreover, the ban was not sustainable. By the summer of , with the ban still in place, some farmers started seeding poppy once again.
In fact, in , after the United States toppled the Taliban regime and Hamid Karzai became the new president, farmers in southern Afghanistan complained that Karzai had promised to let them grow poppy in exchange for their help in toppling the Taliban regime, and that they now felt betrayed. In short, the popular myth that if the Taliban remained in power the drug economy would not have emerged and expanded in Afghanistan is incorrect.
The political costs of destroying the sole source of livelihood for large segments of the population were too great even for the Taliban to ignore, and it became a willing sponsor of the drug economy.
Poppy is deeply entwined in the socio-economic fabric of the country, and hence, inescapably, in its political arrangements and power relations. The Taliban has been profiting from the drug trade, as were various criminal gangs sometimes connected to the government , the Afghan police, various militias, tribal elites, and many ex-warlords-cum-government officials at various levels of the Afghan government.
Sometimes the involved individuals and groups, including of those nominally on the opposite sides of the violent conflict, strongly overlap, and multiple intersections and connections exist among them. During the past 20 years, police units, often highly abusive and criminalized, taxed the drug economy.
Local commanders and powerbrokers equally taxed it as well as owned or sponsored poppy fields. They also rented land to poppy farmers and provided microcredit for cultivation.
Border officials, such as at Kabul airport or at the Spin Boldak or Zaranj crossings, let trafficking pass for a cut of drug profits. With its widespread territorial influence and reach throughout the country, the Taliban has taxed cultivation, processing, and smuggling of drugs; and units and members of the Taliban have been deeply involved in all these elements. In various years, the Taliban allowed its fighters to disengage from fighting in order to collect the drug harvest. The Taliban also collects taxes from independent drug traders and various criminal groups, while suppressing others.
By some estimates opium revenues, all unofficial, illegal, and untaxed, account for half of the Afghan gross national product. Afghan Opium Production. Unfortunately, Afghanistan as a country of localities, clans, and tribes, can witness the complete cessation of planting in one province, while next door cultivation continues to grow at an exponential rate.
While the number of poppy-free provinces has risen, so too has the amount of opium produced. Opium Cultivation by Province. Only Paktia, Paktika, Panjshir, Wardak, and Logar have reported no production for the last two years. Ghazni was hoped to be among that number, but recent disturbances in Andar District have made that questionable. Bayman, Parwan, Nuristan, and Khost are reporting they have achieved zero cultivation in Opium Cultivation from to There are five readily identifiable groups with interests in the production of opium in Afghanistan: farmers, middlemen traffickers and refiners , insurgents, the Afghan government, and coalition forces.
Some are profiting from it, some are hindered by it, and some find it creating schisms within their own ranks.
As with illegal narcotics enterprises elsewhere, the cultivation and production of opiates in Afghanistan attracts the needy, the covetous, the pathological and the sociopathic. Few if any opium producers are doing so in order to clear Afghanistan of non-Muslims or bring about a world-wide caliphate, but many may say so in order to gain acceptance from their demi-monde peers and avoid moral discord.
On the opposing side, there is no disagreement that the narcotics industry is a serious problem, but the level of priority opium is acceded is a subject of much debate. Further points of discord include the method by which the country is to be rid of opium, whether through eradication, a buyback program, or something else. Of course, as in any counterinsurgency, the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural masses, poor and often illiterate.
Already over ten percent of the Afghan people are involved in the opium trade. Farmers, not surprisingly, form the majority of those involved with the opium trade, and being the lowest on the pyramid, are paid the least. Farmers go into opium cultivation most often for economic reasons.
In rural Afghanistan, where opiate abuse is rare, most opium farmers have never seen the results of their harvests. Many of these traffickers use the same smuggling routes into Pakistan that Taliban and other insurgent groups use as well.
The drug merchants operate in much the same shadow environment and remote geography as anti-government insurgents, and as a result there has been cooperation between the two.
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