New York: Though the Taliban, de-facto rulers of Afghanistan, have managed to keep the ban on opium and narcotics, the “trade continues to dominate informal economy” of the country, United Nations monitors have reported.
“This trade sustains a large network of traffickers, criminal organisations, and even some State actors, who derive economic benefits,” a UN report dated 8 December said.
The Taliban seized control of Kabul on 15 August, 2021, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and US and allied forces withdrew following two decades of military presence there.
Poppy cultivation and opium production have fallen to record lows after Taliban took control, but large parts of the industry moved across the border, “where Afghan narcotics networks are demonstrating resilience by relocating farmers and equipment,” the report noted. Those areas, where the industry is being relocated, could potentially benefit Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL)-Khurasan, and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), it said.
Taliban’s ban on opium cultivation in 2022 led to a reduction of heroin being processed and trafficked out of Afghanistan, but it also triggered an increase in prices of dry opium, “roughly four times higher than prices at the time when the ban was announced,” the report said. Dry opium is the main raw product needed for heroin production.
Farmers in Afghanistan, the report noted, have fought back against Taliban’s ban on opiates. Two people were killed in May in a showdown between the de-facto authorities and opium farmers. A month later, protests erupted again. Subsequently, authorities in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan and Jurm agreed to a 15-day window to allow poppy harvest before the fields were to be destroyed.
According to the report, while opium production has dropped, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has observed an uptick in crops used to make synthetic narcotics such as methamphetamine, particularly in rural areas of Afghanistan, where revenue sources are few. These drugs, UN monitors said, could slowly replace opium in the international market.
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Other threats
ISIL-K, led by Sanaullah Ghafari, has proved to be resilient in Afghanistan’s North and East, the report said, even though Taliban and Pakistan have inflicted losses on its leadership. The Islamic State draws its rank and file from poor central Asian communities, living on both sides of the Afghan border.
The outfit, the UN monitoring report noted, staged successful attacks outside Afghanistan last year, striking at a Shia mosque in Iran’s Kerman and at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, Russia.
The TTP, led by Noor Wali Mehsud, has conducted increasingly lethal attacks on the Pakistani military, with more than 600 ambushes and bombings reported in 2025 alone. The outfit, the report said, maintains over 6,000 cadres in Afghanistan provinces of Khost, Kunar, Nangarhar, Paktika and Paktiya.
Even though the Taliban insists it has severed all ties with al-Qaeda, the UN report said, “members of, or sympathisers with, al-Qaida are believed to be in senior positions of the de facto authorities”.
“In summer 2024, the de facto al-Qaida leader, Sayf al-Adl, declared Afghanistan a safe haven and urged loyal al-Qaida members to travel there for training and in order to gain experience and knowledge,” the report said.
Large-scale repatriation of Afghan refugees from Iran and Pakistan has added to economic stresses on the Taliban-ruled country.
Though the Taliban launched a massive programme of seminary development, in a bid to create an educated workforce, its unpopular ban on employment and education of women and girls is likely to have “long-term economic effects, since half the population will not be educated or able to work freely,” the report noted.
Despite dissent against Taliban’s Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, the UN monitoring team assessed that his control over the country remains firm.
“The combined mechanisms of the de-facto Directorate for Implementation and Oversight of the Amir’s (Hibatullah) Decrees, the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and the Supreme Court—under the de-facto Chief Justice Sheikh Abdul Hakim Haqqani—constitute a stable group of hardline clerics close to Hibatullah who have effectively secured strict adherence with his orders,” the report read.
Kandahar’s provincial governor Mullah Mohammad Shirin Akhund is the “principal gatekeeper” for engagement with Hibatullah and has succeeded in marginalising dissidents from the core circle of power, it added.
(Edited by Prerna Madan)
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