Realpolitik: The Taliban knows its population depends on income from the poppy trade. Afghan men surround bags of heroin and hashish as they negotiate and check quality at a drug market on the outskirts of Kandahar. Photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan after it seized the country’s capital, Kabul, in mid-August saw tens of thousands of people flee the country. Afghans who remain are now dependent on the Taliban to govern the war-torn country. But where does this leave the world’s leading opium poppy-producing country?
In contrast to the war-ravaged Asian nation, illicit networks of heroin traders flourish. And the Taliban’s political survival depends on maintaining an illicit market even though it might outweigh financial gains from it.
The country’s earnings from its poppy fields have helped sustain not only civilians, rebel forces and governing parties, but also a profitable trade network of illicit drugs. Since the 1950s, when Iran banned the cultivation of opium poppies, Afghanistan’s arid landscape has been used to cultivate poppies. The trade grew when drought in the Golden Triangle reduced production in Laos, Thailand and Burma. The Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan — which lasted until 1989 — in support of the communist government in its fight against Muslim guerrillas also fuelled poppy cultivation and drug production. In the years between the Soviet withdrawal and the United States invasion in October 2001, opium production financed Mujahideen factions’ battle for power. In 2000 the first Taliban government banned poppy cultivation as un-Islamic. And then the US invaded.
“Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology to transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state — a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions,” wrote The Guardian during the United States’ withdrawal from the country in August.
The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2021 World Drug report said Afghanistan recorded some of its highest levels of opium production in the past four years. In 2017, the country produced 9 900 tons of opium, worth an estimated $1.4-billion.
South Africa, which is a consumer destination for heroin but is not a big player in Afghanistan’s trade, might “down the line” see heroin prices alter slightly, says Simon Howell, a research associate of the Global Risk Governance Programme. South Africa’s primary sources of heroin include the Middle East and Turkey.
“In a very general way [heroin] is produced in Afghanistan and comes down through Africa via the east coast. You find that a lot of the heroin goes across the whole of Africa into Tanzania and Kenya, then via those down to Mozambique or via the Indian Ocean down into South Africa,” says Howell.
Heroin seizures in Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal confirm South Africa’s link with Afghanistan’s drug network.
The Heroin Coast, A Political Economy Along the Eastern African Seaboard, a 2018 research paper funded by the European Union, suggests that about 10 to 40 tonnes of heroin enter Mozambique annually and is largely destined for South Africa, “either for onward traffic to Europe or the US, or for the South African consumer market”.
Although the world’s largest heroin supplier still needs to figure out its place under Taliban rule, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime’s (GITOC’s) 2021 Global Organised Crime Index asserts the “greater risk” of the Taliban’s revival of power is the opportunity its current insecurity might create “for trafficking groups to consolidate their operations in the world’s leading opium poppy-producing country”.
Opioids are used as a legal substance in prescribed pain medicine such as morphine and in the highly addictive illegal drug, heroin.
Aside from its war practices, the Taliban is involved in the opium industry, from planting and extraction to taxing, trafficking and building drug laboratories.
It is said that the Taliban earned as much as $400-million from the drug trade in 2018 and 2019. But this is disputed by David Mansfield, a leading researcher into Afghanistan’s drug trade, whose field studies show it can earn only about $40-million annually from the illicit opium trades.
Jason Eligh, a senior researcher based in Canada for the GITOC, also challenges the numbers in recent reporting alleging the significant financial interest the Taliban has in the illicit drug trade.
“Many of these numbers are grounded in anecdotal accounting and misinformed speculation,” argues Eligh, saying it is “at a far lower amount, and a sum that is dwarfed by the funding it accrues from such things as the taxing of cross-border trade in licit goods”.
“This lower figure [$40-million] appears to be closer to the reality on the ground and, as such, would suggest that the drug trade is not a critical pillar to the financial survival of the Taliban,” he says.
But the Taliban does rely on the support base of Afghanistan’s poor and rural populations for much of their political survival.
“Disrupting the domestic drug market might have some impact on the Taliban’s power base … contributing to rural disaffection within the group and lead to some level of support for competing political factions in these rural areas,” says Eligh.
Further to its political survival, the Taliban also needs to consider its diplomatic recognition. In a bid to gain international support and humanitarian aid, the Taliban, when ruling back in 2001, prohibited the cultivation of poppy. Described as a “merely tactical” move, the ban did hinder opium production but did not stop the illicit market.
“They say that on paper … they just can’t afford to operate and ultimately not profit from the heroin trade,” says Howell, who doubts that the Taliban will impose a ban on poppy cultivation after its August takeover, despite urgent humanitarian needs in the country.
During its first news conference, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid pleaded for “international assistance” after seizing Kabul.
An Afghan farmer harvests opium sap from a poppy field in Zari District in Kandahar province on April 9, 2018. The US government has spent billions of dollars on a war to eliminate drugs from Afghanistan, but the country still remains the world’s top opium producer. (Javid Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images)
Eligh argues there could be “some modest external political capital gained by the Taliban in appearing to take a hard line on the country’s illicit drug trade,” but adds, “Domestically, however, the sociopolitical situation around drugs and drug production is rather more complicated”.
He states that measures taken against drug cultivation might have an adverse effect on the Taliban’s ambition to govern nationally. “While they may signal to potential international donors an intention to pursue a prohibitionist political stance in regard to drug production, there is likely to be much nuance in how this pledge is pursued domestically.”
Eligh says it is too early to “make any serious projections for the future of the Afghan drug trade”.
[/membership]