A year after Kabul’s American debacle, the “new” Taliban, in power now without sharing, have left no illusion on the always aggressive rigorism of their ideology and on the moral order which follows by the daily repression. Admittedly, they present themselves with consistency as engaged in the international fight against terrorism, due to the deadly conflict which opposes them to the local branch of the Islamic State organization (IS). But they continue to maintain solid relations with Al-Qaida, whose chef, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has just been killed, in the middle of Kabul, in an American strike on his residence.
It is however a crucial dimension on which these “new” Taliban people broke with the practice of their predecessors, who controlled Kabul and the vast majority of Afghan territory from 1996 to 2001: this is the question of the poppy, whose Mullah Omar successfully proscribed culture in July 2000.
Fatwa de prohibition
The poppy is planted in the fall so that the juice of his plant, from which opium is fired, is harvested in the spring. The fatwa of the “commander of the believers”, as the Mullah Omar had proclaimed, had an immediate impact on the entire Taliban territory, resulting in a collapse of opium production in 2001, and therefore a drainage of flows global heroin, of which Afghanistan was already the main source.
The brutality of such a prohibition has not contributed little to weaken the rural anchoring of the Taliban regime, unable to resist more than a few weeks to the offensive led by the United States in October 2001. During their patient Reconquesting power, two decades long, the “new” Taliban joined the lesson of a prohibition so devastating for the peasant seat of their movement. In the regions gradually passed under their control, they organized the taxation of the culture of the poppy and the traffic of opiates, without generally taking charge of the drug production chain themselves.
The most prominent drug barons continued to collaborate with the authorities of Kabul, then under protectorate of the United States. As early as 2006, the UN was worried about what “Afghanistan is going from narco-economy to narco-state”. The historic record of 8,200 tonnes of opium produced in 2007 was broken in 2017, with 9,000 tonnes, mainly from government zones. It was, moreover, in the summer of 2021, the Taliban assault on the provinces richest in opium which precipitates the fall of the Afghan capital. There is no longer any question, for the new masters of Kabul, of depriving themselves of the amazing windfall, while international sanctions and a severe drought have already plunged the campaigns into a lasting depression. According to the UN, the surfaces grown in poppy for the 2020-2021 season are around 177,000 hectares, for an opium production estimated in 2021 at 6,800 tonnes, up 8 % compared to 2020. Still according to the UN, opioid income is evaluated in 2021 between 1.8 and 2.7 billion dollars , or from 6 to 11 % of Afghan GDP.
You have 37.48% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.