Opium has remained a central part of the Afghan economy since the withdrawal of American forces in 2021 and the restoration of Taliban rule. However, the change of power in Kabul has changed the geopolitics of the country’s drug trade. Afghanistan’s opium game, its players and its rules are very different than they were a year ago.
The Taliban’s takeover of the drug economy comes as no surprise. When the Taliban last came to power around the turn of the century, they briefly attempted to ban poppy cultivation, but met with widespread popular opposition, including from farmers who relied on it for a living in the absence of a functioning economy . After falling from power following the US invasion in 2001, the Taliban, aided by local Afghan farmers, have stepped up poppy cultivation to fund their own war effort against the newly installed government in Kabul.
The United States committed billions of dollars — more than $8 billion over 15 years per account — to eradicate poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and deprive the Taliban and related insurgent groups of an important source of funding. The ambitious plan included airstrikes and laboratory attacks. But the attempt ultimately failed. Afghanistan’s drug production, which accounts for over 80 percent of the world’s opium and heroin production, hit an all-time high in 2017, with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimating the total size of its opiate business at up to US$6.6 billion or around 30 percent of Afghan GDP.
Opium has remained a central part of the Afghan economy since the withdrawal of American forces in 2021 and the restoration of Taliban rule. However, the change of power in Kabul has changed the geopolitics of the country’s drug trade. Afghanistan’s opium game, its players and its rules are very different than they were a year ago.
The Taliban’s takeover of the drug economy comes as no surprise. When the Taliban last came to power around the turn of the century, they briefly attempted to ban poppy cultivation, but met with widespread popular opposition, including from farmers who relied on it for a living in the absence of a functioning economy . After falling from power following the US invasion in 2001, the Taliban, aided by local Afghan farmers, have stepped up poppy cultivation to fund their own war effort against the newly installed government in Kabul.
The United States committed billions of dollars — more than $8 billion over 15 years per account — to eradicate poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and deprive the Taliban and related insurgent groups of an important source of funding. The ambitious plan included airstrikes and laboratory attacks. But the attempt ultimately failed. Afghanistan’s drug production, which accounts for over 80 percent of the world’s opium and heroin production, hit an all-time high in 2017, with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimating the total size of its opiate business at up to US$6.6 billion or around 30 percent of Afghan GDP.
As an insurgent group, the Taliban had no choice but to work with local traffickers and regional smugglers, who focused on the heavily guarded Iranian border as the most viable way to get tons of opium, heroin and meth into lucrative markets across Europe and Canada . With security and law enforcement pressures mounting in Afghanistan and along the border with Iran, Taliban-backed traffickers have occasionally gone so far as to rely on equipment to catapult shipments of drugs across the Iranian border, or heavily stunned, unmanned cattle that are unsuspicious trudged into Iran.
Not surprisingly, the Taliban government today began adopting draconian measures to tackle opiate addiction in society and regulate domestic supply and demand. That doesn’t mean, however, that Afghanistan’s new rulers have lost sight of European markets. On the contrary, the long-term goal seems to be moving towards centralizing the drug industry into government hands and ultimately maximizing the revenue from this industry in the treasury.
According to a research report by UNODC, total revenues from the illicit opiate business in the country alone ranged from $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion in 2021, with most of the profit going to actors controlling international supply chains. These actors are now the Taliban themselves and their foreign allies. “The Taliban count on the Afghan opium trade as one of their main sources of income,” César Guedes, head of the UNODC office in Kabul, told Reuters last year. Also, Taliban officials are no longer hampered by the political considerations that motivated US-led anti-narcotics policies. This policy was largely pursued to protect allied European nations from relentless drug flows and the resulting organized crime. The Taliban now pledge to patrol and protect their borders to prevent drug trafficking, but in reality they are deliberately overlooking smuggling activities.
The emerging status quo has serious repercussions for Iran, which has traditionally served as the main transit route for international drug trafficking from Afghanistan. Tehran has generally refrained from using drugs as a state revenue tool or as a strategic means of exerting pressure on the West.
The Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure campaign against Iran threatened to change that policy. In July 2018, shortly after the administration of then-US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and reinstated sweeping sanctions on Tehran, Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli pointed to the increase in drug production in Afghanistan to over 9,000 tons per year and warned that if Tehran looked the other way, “over 5,000 tons of drugs would leave Iran’s borders heading west.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps actually made some efforts during this period to capitalize on the illegal opiate industry next door. Iran ultimately did not make a major policy shift for various political and practical reasons, including the Iranian government’s keen interest in preserving the reputational benefits of a well-functioning relationship with the United Nations on counternarcotics.
Iran, while facing increased pressure at its borders, is no longer the primary regional gatekeeper for the Afghan drug trade. This role has now fallen to Turkey. Ankara’s interest in narcotics grew significantly during the course of the Syrian civil war, where opiates are known to have been heavily used by front-line combatants in hand-to-hand combat. During the war, Turkey supported an unconventional constellation of militant and paramilitary groups in Syria, which over time had to develop their own local economy to fund their war effort. These groups, with at least some encouragement and support from Turkey, resorted to illegal fuel and drug deals.
Since Turkey took control of Afghanistan’s Kabul Airport earlier this year, it has, with the blessing of the Taliban, taken a long-term stake in Afghanistan’s domestic markets and its international trade, including its multi-billion dollar drug business. This would be similar to how the Turkish government helped flood Iraqi and Syrian markets with Turkish products after the conflict. Turkey’s tight control over the opiate supply lines leading to Afghanistan also gives it an added advantage: it gives Ankara strategic leverage to exert on European rivals at times of high tension and crisis, as has been the case with Ankara’s actions on Syria was war refugees and migratory flows. “We believe that some [Afghan methamphetamine] went to Turkey,” said Laurent Laniel, an analyst at the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. “And if it does reach Turkey, then we expect some to go to Europe.”
The Russian invasion and continued occupation of Ukraine is bound to further complicate this new geopolitics, not only by diverting scarce resources and political attention from international anti-drug campaigns, but also by creating a massive demand that organized the transnational Crime and its state supporters will not hesitate to meet. For one thing, Moscow’s mass dispatch of battle-hardened foreign fighters from Syria to Ukraine is likely to facilitate drug-related criminal links between the two conflict zones. And among those who benefit from all this illegal activity will almost certainly be the Taliban.
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