The Afghan Opium Trade: The Taliban and the Government

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Although almost nearly two years ago, the capture and indictment of a Mullah Abdul Rashid Baluch once the Taliban shadow governor of the ‘Nimruz Province’, has cast a serious light on the evolution and rapidly changing nature of insurgency and its connections with the opium trade in Afghanistan.  Mullah Rashid who was captured after an Afghan special forces team descended on his convoy in July 2014 seizing nearly a metric ton of opium along with other light machine guns, assault rifles and munitions seems to have been just a glimpse of the Taliban’s further involvement in the production and distribution of drugs in and from Afghanistan.  Likewise,  increasingly more senior Taliban leaders are becoming involved directly in the illicit drug trade,  which has made it more difficult to distinguish the group from a drug cartel.  Even the most recent figure to claim leadership of the Taliban–Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, has seemingly deepening ties and a personal investment in the opium trade; where as head of the tribal Ishaqzai drug trafficking organization, he bought off fellow Taliban dissenters using his own sizable fortune in order to secure his position as leader of the Taliban.

Helmand Province poppy harvestThis recent change in the nature and involvement of the Taliban in the heroin trade has also raised serious concerns in the international community, where the United Nations warned that the Taliban’s increasing involvement in drug trafficking “has real consequences for peace and security in Afghanistan, as it encourages those within the Taliban movement who have the greatest economic incentives to oppose any meaningful process of reconciliation with the new government.”  Notably this increasing Taliban involvement in drug smuggling has stemmed from the sheer profitability of the drug trade compared to other illegal operations such as the smuggling of precious gems and lumber.  Additionally, the lack of income from traditional donors in the Persian Gulf has ultimately forced the Taliban to become more self-reliant financially, which has undoubtedly pushed them more into the smuggling of opium.

However, the large financial incentives of the opium trade do not stop with the Taliban. In the district of Garmsir, Afghani poppy cultivation has become so lucrative that local government officials have imposed a tax on poppy farmers in order to raise revenue for the state.  This tax, similar to what the Taliban does to poppy farmers that it controls, casts an unwanted shadow on the U.S. attempts to establish counter-narcotics programs which have cost more than $8.4 billion over the past fourteen years in efforts to combat the increasing poppy production in Afghanistan which boasts roughly 780 square miles of opium growing operations.

Kabul Opium Trade  Overall it seems that with rising levels of heroin use both in the Afghanistan and in the U.S., the increasingly closer ties between the Taliban, Afghani state officials and their respective opium production and trafficking can only lead to more instability, violence and greater turmoil in the future; and when it comes to establishing a legitimate and stable system of governance in Afghanistan, much work is yet to be done.