Doubling down on a longtime policy of countering the opium trade in Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan forces began conducting airstrikes against opium production facilities and insurgent funding sources in November.
After years of back-to-back record-breaking poppy yields, the move represented a policy shift targeting terror groups and their revenue streams. Opium has long been the boogeyman of Afghanistan, with top officials in the military and government saying it funds insurgent groups such as the Taliban.
“We are hitting [the Taliban] where it hurts, in the wallet,” U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Lance Bunch said at a news conference in Kabul in June.
For most of the nearly 17-year war, U.S. law enforcement officials have operated in Afghanistan based on claims that “[opium] is being sold by Afghani terrorist organizations with the intent of killing Americans,” Gary Hale, drug policy fellow at the James A. Baker III institute for Public Policy, told Homeland411.
After months of increased airstrikes, the United States is seeking direct talks with the Taliban. Both Gen. John Nicholson, the commanding officer of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and President Ashraf Ghani’s office reiterated that the process will remain “Afghan led.” The New York Times and others reported the track remains open.
When it comes to peace talks with the Taliban, National Security Advisor John Bolton isn’t optimistic.
“Some peace talks are going on now … they have never led to anything,” he told Homeland411 earlier this month.
Researchers who study the Afghan opium trade doubt the Taliban is so deeply intertwined with the opium market. While the group earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year from opium, it is a small share of the multi-billion-dollar illicit industry that makes up 16 percent of Afghanistan’s total gross domestic product.
“There’s a lot of overstating,” said David Mansfield a senior fellow at the London School of Economics, who spoke to Homeland411. Mansfield is author of A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan and has conducted more than 20 years of on-the-ground research in Afghanistan’s opium market. “There are methodological issues around the claim that the Taliban makes so much money from drugs,” he said.
Bunch said that the military estimates the campaign has eliminated more than $45 million worth of opium since it began airstrikes in November, a number Mansfield said is “infeasible.”
In May 2001, when it still controlled most of Afghanistan, the Taliban banned opium cultivation, and the U.S. government granted them a $43 million aid package—$61 million in today’s dollars.
“It is hard to know what the exact effect is,” Bolton said. “Unless you sustain this … the drug cultivators and drug traffickers come back.”
Hundreds of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents have cycled through Afghanistan raiding drug markets and arresting opium kingpins since the war started. In the early years of the war, the DEA provided intelligence to military operations, according to Hale, who was also the former chief of intelligence at DEA’s Houston division.
The United States has spent billions on counternarcotic operations, money that in 2009 then-Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke described as the “most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years in and out of government.”
The current round of airstrikes has further driven up opium eradication’s price tag. Mansfield calculates, using public data on the cost of flying the planes and bombs used, that one bombing run launched from the United Arab Emirates to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province costs the United States roughly a $1 million. The Air Force has conducted 154 strikes, with several more launched by the Afghan Air Force, according to Bunch.
In the first six months of 2018, the number of bombs and other weapons dropped on Afghanistan has more than tripled compared to the same time period in 2017. Over that period, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported 149 deaths and 204 injuries related to air strikes, a 52 percent jump compared to the first six months of 2017.
“Our airstrikes and raids are targeted very specifically in order to avoid civilian casualties while putting maximum financial pressure on the insurgents,” Bunch said, adding that no credible allegations of civilian casualties have been reported as a result of the campaign targeting opium and other funding sources.
The Air Force in Afghanistan declined to comment on this story.
Flowers and Guns
In opium’s heartland, green squares press against brown expanses of dessert. U.S.-built and funded irrigation systems rehydrate the soil now carpeted with poppy plants. When the warm Afghan spring returns, the plants are lanced, releasing heroin’s main ingredient and Afghanistan’s largest employer.
More than half a million people earn a living from opium, Mansfield said. For rural farmers in some places like Helmand Province, it provides one of the only means of income.
“If people didn’t grow poppy, they wouldn’t have a home,” Mansfield said.
The Afghan economy’s dependence on opium is only growing. Last year, production jumped to an all-time high with an 87 percent increase from 2016, according to data from the United Nations office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
While earing roughly half their income from opium, the Taliban and its control over the opium market is tribal and fractured. Members of the Taliban float in and out as allegiances shift in Afghanistan’s tribal, rural areas.
Poppy was sparsely cultivated in Afghanistan before the 1970s. It took root when the U.S.- and Pakistan-backed Mujahideen rebels needed to fund their resistance against Soviet occupation and neighboring Iran had banned opium’s production. As the country descended into civil war after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, parts of the Mujahideen spun off into the Taliban, and the cultivation of opium continued to fund the insurgents.
Under the first years of the Taliban’s draconian grip in the late 1990s, poppy thrived as a main cash crop. Its ban on cultivation in early 2001 was one of the few times in Afghanistan’s history that poppy cultivation declined.
When U.S. operations in Afghanistan swelled, counternarcotic efforts became a top law enforcement priority. By the mid-2000s, more than a hundred DEA agents were stationed in Afghanistan. A long-drawn war on drugs in the United States had been exported to the soon-to-be multi-decade war on terror in Afghanistan.
DEA agents embedded with the military, and several lost their lives overseas. Even though they managed to arrest several kingpins and raid drug bazaars, law enforcement’s relationship began to sour with the military over expanding civilian operations. Top Department of Justice officials drew up a classified memo outlining their plans to pursue high-value targets, but that effort was eventually shelved by the Obama administration. The memo currently sits locked away in the American embassy in Kabul, POLITICO recently reported.
When the Obama administration began to draw down troop levels in 2011, many of the DEA and other law enforcement agents went with them.
The efforts of both the military and law enforcement failed to even dent the sprawling drug trade in Afghanistan. Even the farmers in provinces that managed to go “poppy free” in 2010 simply switched from cultivator to traffickers. Since 2001, opium production has grown 4,300 percent, according to data from the UNODC.
During some points of the war, the military even helped guard poppy fields while attempting to give farmers alternative crops to grow.
Now that the military is in charge of anti-opium operations, the focus is on destroying rather than arresting. The airstrikes aim to “devastate Taliban revenue sources,” but the Taliban draw funds from a variety of sources beyond opium. Mineral mines, extortion, support from Russia, Pakistan, and Iran continue to bankroll the group.
In recent weeks, Iran has shown increased support for the Taliban.
“Iran is the largest contributor to terrorist groups,” Bolton said.
Few Details
When President Donald Trump outlined his Afghanistan strategy in August, he offered few details but hit hard at his core message, “we are not nation-building again; we are killing terrorists.”
The aim is to support the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and expand U.S. military operations to pound the Taliban into peace talks. The airstrikes, which the U.S. Air Forces Central Command Combined Air Operations Center says, “devastate Taliban revenue sources,” are a key part of forcing them to the negotiating table to create a political settlement.
In June the Afghan government and Taliban agreed on an unprecedented cease-fire during the holiday of Eid-al-Fitr. Social media was flooded with images of Taliban fighters and Afghan security forces posing for photos together. While brief, the relative peace gave a respite to a country stung by decades of war. Since the ceasefire, several top U.S. officials have called for it to be extended.
The recent step to announce direct talks with the Taliban have given some cautious hope the stalemate might inch toward a political resolution.
Trump classified much of the data once used as indicators for progress in the country. That now-classified information includes both U.S. and Afghan troop levels, civilian casualties, and the amount of territory the Taliban controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.
Mansfield worries the airstrikes might push Afghans away from supporting the government. “They are seen as just another incident of violence against the rural population,” he said.
Jackson Barnett is a staff writer for Homeland411.
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