Afghanistan is kicking opium the most dangerous way it can: cold turkey with no plan B

Taliban eradicate a poppy field in Helmand province, Afghanistan. AP

It must be frustrating to be a Taliban drug enforcement officer in Afghanistan. The country’s still-young militant government just led “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history” (in the words of International Crisis Group’s Graeme Smith), something, it must be said, the US spent a huge amount of blood and treasure trying and failing to achieve in Afghanistan. But before anyone had a chance to celebrate, analysts and journalists were already implying that getting rid of all that opium was a huge mistake.

Sadly, they are probably right – not because Afghanistan should remain a narco-state, but rather because there is much more to a successful counternarcotics policy than destroying drugs. The Taliban should know this very well: like Afghanistan itself, the Taliban’s movement was once dependent on drugs (not physically, of course, but politically and economically) and rather than go cold turkey, it only ended that dependency when it was ready.

Before it was leading the government, the Taliban seemingly spent 20 years trying to decide exactly how much of a sin growing and selling narcotics really is. When the group was in power in the year 2000, it banned opium for a time, only to walk that back after a popular backlash amid the country’s ongoing civil war. Ten years later, during the US occupation, Taliban commanders featured prominently in the opium trade. The low estimate for the Taliban's annual drug trade earnings during the war was about $40 million, and the high estimate 10 times that.

Opium did a lot for the Taliban – not just financially, but politically, too. America’s very expensive poppy eradication campaign between 2002 and 2017 was deeply unpopular, considering the trade employs nearly half a million Afghans, and is thought to have led to many mass defections to the Taliban in that period.

When the Taliban came to power in 2021, few expected its relationship with opium to change much. Even when the Taliban supreme leader announced a ban on opium (several times, last year and this year), few thought it would be enforceable. I certainly didn’t.

It even seemed, for a long time, like the supreme leader’s pronouncements against opium were counterproductive. Opium production last year had risen by a third, as price hikes from an expected ban made cultivation more lucrative, encouraging more farmers to pile in before the good times came to an end.

But, after nearly two years in power, the Taliban have proven that although they are not so good at making decisions, they have become very good at enforcing them. In the past year, Taliban commanders have destroyed more poppies than any other government ever – 80 per cent of the opium crop in a country that produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium.

Why were they able to do this with so much success now? It's because they have consolidated power in Afghanistan to an unprecedented degree, and there is no real opposition for critics of the Taliban’s new drug policy to flock to. In other words, the Taliban was finally strong enough to get off drugs for good.

Afghanistan, however, may not be. As David Mansfield, an expert on Afghanistan’s drug trade, has pointed out, if the Taliban ban extends to future growing seasons, many wealthier farmers will be okay, but large numbers of others in the trade with little or no land of their own will be unemployed. Those who seek work in other sectors are likely to see their wages fall because of the wider economic fallout. In an economy that was already propped up largely by international aid before the Taliban and has crumbled since, an unemployment spike of the kind Afghanistan is expected to see is likely to result in another large wave of outmigration.

“Indeed,” Dr Mansfield writes, “Were a protracted ban in place, European nations might face a choice between Afghan drugs or Afghan migrants.”

Would it ever have been possible to destroy Afghanistan’s opium trade without causing economic upheaval, given just how dependent on poppies the country is?

Sure. There is a counterfactual history in which the Taliban were just slightly more pragmatic, more reasonable and therefore more palatable to the world – including to would-be investors. In that alternate timeline, the Afghan economy, even under Taliban rule, might be a little – or even a lot – stronger than it is today, and the blow of losing the opium trade would not be so harsh.

But we are not in that timeline. In this one, Afghanistan is unique from other places in the region that have trouble attracting enough investment to strengthen and diversify their economies. Afghanistan is not economically isolated because it is dangerous, or unstable, or warmongering or even because its leadership is under sanctions. It is economically isolated because – from its shunning of women from public life to its opaque leadership – it is simply too off-putting to almost anyone who is not a diehard supporter of the Taliban’s extreme worldview.

The real story regarding sanctions provides a good illustration of that. There are actually fewer legal barriers than most people seem to think when it comes to investing in Afghanistan’s economy; a general licence issued by the US Department of the Treasury last year allows anyone to do business in Afghanistan without falling afoul of sanctions, so long as they are not transacting with the specific Taliban leaders on the US sanctions list. In practice, however, it remains difficult because of “over-compliance” from international banks. These banks have developed a habit of blocking most Afghan-related transactions, not to comply with the letter of the law, but out of either a false, though perhaps unsurprising, perception that doing business with a country run by the Taliban is illegal, or a very real conviction that it is unethical.

Without a serious change in the Taliban’s behaviour – like re-opening girls’ schools or finally forming an inclusive government – Afghanistan will continue to be a difficult place for its own people to live in, but it will also find it challenging to tackle its crippling image problem. And if that does not change, it is hard to see, when all the opium is finally gone, what could take its place.