Opium: Bedrock of the Taliban
August 24, 2021
The Afghan economy has almost always been a tottering one in the 20th (and 21st) century. Highly agrarian in the earlier half of the last century, the then monarchy’s objective was to assert State authority by levying heavy taxes on harvests to fund military upgradation. It was only in the 1950s that this outlook changed. A push to rapidly industrialise led to the initiation of projects such as the Helmand Valley Authority Projects. This progress came to a halt in late 1970s, with the Soviet invasion and crippling Cold War tactics that shifted the emphasis from all-round economic growth and derailed the fledgling infrastructure projects. From 2001 onwards, as the last Taliban regime was toppled, Afghanistan shifted from a centrally planned economy to a free market setup, spurring high growth, temporarily.
Parallely, a particularly significant domestic crop came to acquire a coveted spot in the global market, too. What’s more, they have become world leaders in its production and supply.
The crop in question, of course, is opium poppy.
The production of opium poppy was spurred in the 1950s and 1960s to cater to a growing demand in neighbouring states and the Western nations.ii Soviets provided a fillip to its cultivation, because after invading, they couldn’t adopt the emergent free market chassis of the Afghan economy, and thus had to resort to incentivising opium poppy production to raise revenue. This emphasis on its cultivation didn’t decline with their departure in 1989; in fact, local warlords actually grew more wanton in their opium production, especially after neighbouring Pakistan – another opium poppy production hub – was forced to downsize operations on the instructions of the US (thus opening a potential supply gap)iii. This reached a fever pitch in 1999 under the Taliban, when production shot up 125% as compared to 1998. Though this was followed by a startlingly effective ban on opium production (due to its concurrent classification as haram), when the country was freed in 2001, the prevailing conditions of war and strife forced many of the poorer cultivators to slowly go back to growing opium poppy.
Though one may not like to admit it, the subsequent ban on opium production imposed by the newly appointed government wasn’t half as effective as its predecessor, principally because of top-down oversight mechanisms and lack of ground-based unbiased reporting. In a cycle of corruption that involved local authorities and even high-ranking Ministers in the new government, opium production grew at a dizzying pace, despite the efforts of the US to keep it in check.vi An important reason for this was that the very local warlords with whose cooperation the US kept an eye on the dynamic security situation and fought insurgency on ground, were neck-deep in illicit opium production themselves. Given this trade-off, US enforcement of counter narcotics operations was lax.
Yet, even as the American government kept pumping money (amounting to a staggering $8.62 billion by 2017) into counter narcotics along with its Western allies, Afghanistan slowly established itself as the source of nearly 85-90% of all illicit opium trafficked in the world. The primary problem has always been the secondary importance given to counter narcotics in the face of security threats – this decoupling of narcotics and security, continuously practised by the Western allies led by the US, led to a war of attrition, because till funding for the cause exists, the thousands of fanatics teeming to join the Taliban ranks will always find a medium to pursue their goal, regardless of however many regions are nominally secured by Afghan allies (that too, mostly at American gunpoint) for a while. In stark contrast to this, the Taliban have fought tooth and nail to maintain some semblance of influence, even at their weakest (circa 2002-03), in the southwest and north of the country – not coincidentally, the regions with consistently the highest opium poppy yields.They complement this stranglehold over production of raw opium with a broader model to command taxation authority over all steps involved in the illicit opium value-addition chain: from the labs that refine opium used to manufacture heroin and other opiates, to the actual cross-border trade of drugs. Their control over border areas has also been damaging, as it provides them an easy way to siphon off import duties, thus augmenting their coffers while also depriving the government of much-needed revenue. Even as the US ramped up efforts to counter the menace of opium production, the outcome was not eradication, but merely relocation, of opium cultivation and processing from semi-urban and urban to rural areas, where Taliban has traditionally had a stronger grip. As has been seen time and again, imposition of supply-side restrictions on items such as drugs only leads to them being driven away from the purview of administration, underground – the same problem persisted with the Kimberley Process (that aims to deal with conflict diamonds) initially, and with the UN-sanctioned arms embargo on the Central African Republic.
The Taliban seem to have planned their power-grab perfectly: with the onset of COVID-19, as incomes from other sources are hit, many cultivators would be contemplating a shift to the more remunerative opium cultivation. With area cultivated with opium growing at a rapid pace (an increment of 37% in 2019-20ix, for instance), gross production of opium and corresponding illicit drug trade can be expected to increase. Early signs of this hypothesis bearing out can be found in statements by officials from the Customs Department and Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in India, who noted a sudden uptick in seizures of illicit heroin originating from Afghanistan on the shores of Kerala very recently.
All in all, the onset of another era of Taliban control over Afghanistan brings grim tidings for counter narcotics officials across the world.
