New York- My work in Afghanistan for the Jamestown Foundation was cited in the paper “The Opium of Afghanistan: The Taliban Center of Gravity” by Lieutenant Commander Matt Ross. The Taliban infamously went from slashing poppy yields in the Helmand river valley etc in the name of implementing the sharia after they had seized control of all of Afghan Pashtoonistan to fueling the opium trade sustain their insurgency against the ANA & ANP and Western forces stationed in their country. The drugs trade allowed the Taliban to outlast those they could never outgun.
When the Taliban took control of the entirety of Afghanistan in August 2021 following a twenty year-long American strategic failure, observers were curious what would happen to the country’s vast poppy harvests. In April 2022, the Taliban issued an edict that since they had won their long war against the United States and other external powers, they would revert to the 1990s stance on opium being haram in their impoverished emirate. LTC Ross’s paper was written at roughly the midpoint of American power projection in Central Asia post-9/11.
Though the Taliban of thirty years ago and today would and do cite the implementation of Islamic morality codes as their justification for their internal war on drugs, their policy also resides with a fiarly pragmatic regional context. Afghanistan is desperately landlocked and its export of highly addictive narcotics has taken a massive human toll on its neighbors Iran and Pakistan (not to mention Türkmenistan, Uzbekistan etc) in the form of drug addicted populations neither state is respectively equipped to take care on a large scale. This is where vice, virtue, and practicality all dovetail for the Taliban’s fissiparous leadership between Kabul and Kandahar.
