The Brotherhood of Universal Love, it called itself, a label that, in 1969, invited no ironic raising of eyebrows. From Balkh and Mazar-i–Sharif, where children sold hashish beads, hashish-filled belts, and hashish-heeled shoes, members of the commune trafficked the finest resins in their beaten-down vans, sailboats, or simply stuffed inside suitcases aboard the $100 hippie buses that used to run from London and Amsterdam to Kathmandu. Thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents record the frustrations of trying to dismantle a network with no apparent leadership or profit motive.
For weeks now, Afghan media have been reporting increasingly savage clashes between peasants growing opium poppies in the northern region of Badakhshan. Ethnic Tajik farmers were tending their fields near the village of Shahran, some accounts say, when six people were reportedly executed by firing squad.
Though figures on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan are notoriously unreliable, experts agree that the Islamic Emirate’s hardline crackdown on the crop has intensified rural hardship. For the most part, land used until 2023 to grow poppies has shifted to wheat — a low-yield, low-value crop. The United Nations World Food Programme says Afghanistan is now becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with 22.8 million people facing severe hunger, and another 8.7 million in acute crisis.
For generations, poppies and hashish provided marginal peasants with a cash income to insulate themselves against poor rainfall and crop failures. The 9/11 wars, though, saw intense efforts to choke the Taliban’s funding by targeting the drug lords who transported refined heroin to markets in Europe. The Islamic Emirate institutionalised these policies in 2022, hoping to improve its international legitimacy and ensure that local power brokers would no longer have access to funds.
The ironies of the war on drugs are impossible to miss. The United States spent over $8 billion over a decade and a half to eradicate poppy — burning fields, bombing processing labs, and ambushing trade convoys. A US government audit conducted in 2011 recorded that $1 billion had been invested in agriculture, but there was no way to gauge progress “due to insufficient or incomplete data.”
America’s war on drugs might just have crushed the heroin industry, some experts argue, with European consumers switching to industrially manufactured opioids like fentanyl, tramadol, and oxycodone. But that success has come at the cost of starving a nation. The rebellion in Badakshan shows the peasants have no intention of marching quietly to their graves.
Morals and hunger
Ever since its genesis, American drug policy has been deeply influenced by moral questions over the use of narcotics. The American missionaries who arrived in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century saw the tremendous destruction wrought on Chinese society by the imperialist opening of their markets to opium. At the same time, as scholar James Bamford observes, the missionaries failed to see that elites in the Philippines were also using revenues from opium to build schools, hospitals, and infrastructure that the colonial government had failed to provide.
From early in the twentieth century, it also became clear that opium was a source of political power, Bamford notes. In 1929, police in Paris arrested the Afghan minister to France, Ala Ghulam Nabi, on charges of trafficking 250 kilograms of heroin, then valued at one million Francs. Ghulam Nabi hoped to raise an army to restore King Amanullah Khan, the country’s modernising monarch, to the throne.
Through the 1950s, as Afghanistan became more enmeshed in global counter-narcotics efforts, the state stepped up attempts to prohibit poppy cultivation. In 1958, 3,000 small opium farmers were forced to transition to growing wheat and barley under a US-backed scheme. However, 15,000 agricultural workers linked to the poppy harvest lost their jobs, and famine loomed. Aid was promised to help the community, but never materialised — and soon, poppies began blooming again.
Like the Brotherhood of Universal Love, many actors cashed in on Afghanistan’s crop: Iranian insurgents, Kurdish terrorists fighting Turkey, and plain-vanilla criminal cartels. Even though billions of dollars continued to be spent on the so-called war on drugs, it became clear that prohibition had failed.
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Poppies and power
Fighting against the Soviet Union from 1979, mujahideen commanders quickly saw the potential of the opium crop. Although the mujahideen were generously financed by donors from the Middle East and the West, many jihad commanders saw opium as a means to build independent power. Gretchen Peters describes how jihad commander Mullah Mohammad Nasim Akhundzada “set production quotas, implemented a predatory loan service to small poppy farmers,” and “reportedly threatened farmers who failed to plant poppy with castration or death.”
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) infrastructure was used to bring in weapons, medicine, and food — and carry back opium. The drugs were shipped to Europe and the US through Karachi’s crime cartels, with the profits laundered through property markets and stock exchanges.
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, expert David Winston recorded in a study published by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), “engaged heavily in the heroin trade”. Zia, Winston wrote, “fostered an ecosystem of government protection of heroin dealers, government officials profiting off of the heroin trade, and significant political influence of heroin syndicates in the government.”
The Taliban’s mullahs, who took power in 1997, also capitalised on the trade. In 1996, Afghanistan produced 2,250 metric tonnes of opium. That number soared to 4,580 metric tonnes by 1999. From 2006 onwards, as the Taliban re-emerged from their sanctuaries in Pakistan, narcotics became an increasingly significant source of revenue. The Taliban taxed illegal semi-precious stone mines, truck traffic, and small businesses. In spite of international sanctions, the trade continued to thrive.
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A poisonous legacy
The Taliban know from experience that the poppy is more potent than holy edicts. The First Taliban Emirate produced 75 per cent of the world’s opium supply. In 1999, the regime decreed a one-third cut in production, and nine years later, announced a total ban. The ban appeared to succeed, but sharp drop in output was largely due to drought-like conditions. After 9/11, the Taliban were forced to withdraw the ban, fearing a farmer revolt just as they were preparing for war against the US.
When economic crisis swept through Afghanistan in 2021 and the Islamic Emirate returned to power, opium and synthetic drugs became a valuable economic cushion. The International Crisis Group (ICG) estimates that the withdrawal of foreign troops and donors shrank the country’s GDP by nearly one-third. The poppy harvest continued to provide over 100,000 jobs, many of them to the poorest Afghans.
The Taliban’s 2022 decision to ban poppy cultivation, therefore, came as a surprise to most observers. By late 2023, authorities were raiding and torching drug labs in Bahramcha, reputedly the largest drug market in southern Afghanistan. In April 2024, they enforced the ban on opium trading in the main bazaars of Helmand and Farah. Abdul Wadood Bazaar in Farah, said to be the world’s largest drug bazaar, was shut down. Floggings and executions of drug traffickers have become common.
Local resistance to prohibition, however, has flared in the face of economic realities, especially in Nangarhar and Badakhshan. Taliban fighters exchanged fire with poppy farmers in Nangarhar in 2022, the ICG says, and there have been multiple clashes in Badakhshan and Ghor. Large landowners and traffickers have managed to survive the ban relatively well, holding on to stockpiles they can sell gradually.
Finding a way forward won’t be easy. The most commonly suggested alternatives — pomegranate, figs, almonds, and pistachios — require significant upfront investment. Some farmers have turned to cotton, but the water-hungry crop is hardly sustainable in a country often hit by drought.
The world has a shared interest in helping Afghan farmers transition away from poppy. But time and again, the international community has shown itself willing to abandon them — and the young people killed by their poisonous harvest — to their fate.
Praveen Swami is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
opium and poppy was from the americans as the afghan lands are quite fertile… only to prevent their own population from death by consuming fentanyl, the americans during their occupation support the drugs heavily…now taliban has imposed a ban an its almost non existent – the optium n poppy!! much of the afghan population was destroyed due to this menace of drugs during the occupation period..