The group’s ban on poppy farming has reportedly slashed Afghanistan’s opioid manufacturing by 80% in a single yr
The Taliban has reportedly achieved in a single yr what America’s “war on drugs” failed to tug off in 5 many years: eliminating the overwhelming majority of Afghanistan’s opium output.
Since the Taliban banned poppy farming nationwide in April 2022, Afghanistan has carried out “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history,” the UK Telegraph newspaper reported on Saturday. Afghan poppy manufacturing has dropped by an estimated 80% prior to now yr, the report stated. Poppy cultivation has plunged by greater than 99%, to round 2,500 acres, in Helmand province, which British troops occupied for a lot of the 20-year, US-led conflict in Afghanistan.
The Telegraph famous that no such provide reductions have been achieved throughout Washington’s 50-year conflict on medicine, together with 20 years of US presence in Afghanistan. The Central Asian nation traditionally accounts for greater than 80% of worldwide opium manufacturing and 95% of European opioid provides. The United Nations, amongst different observers, has raised concern that the ensuing shortfall may result in extra use of artificial opioids, similar to fentanyl, that are probably much more harmful than heroin.
With the US in charge of Afghanistan in 2004, the Washington-backed authorities in Kabul set a objective of eliminating poppy cultivation inside 10 years. Instead, cultivation and output really rose in the course of the US occupation, at the same time as American taxpayers reportedly spent no less than $9 billion to eradicate the trade.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a protracted historical past of involvement within the narcotics commerce. A US State Department report in 1991 discovered that covert CIA operations in Afghanistan had remodeled the area from a “self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market.”
Nevertheless, US media shops pointed fingers on the Taliban for allegedly permitting opium manufacturing to rise after the Islamist group retook management of Afghanistan in August 2021. For occasion, US state-funded Radio Free Europe claimed as not too long ago as May 2023 that Afghan poppy cultivation had jumped as a result of the Taliban authorities was unwilling to implement its ban on the crop.
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Ironically, the US authorities’s United States Institute of Peace faulted the Taliban final month for being too profitable in slashing opium output. “The temptation to view the current ban in an overly positive light — as an important global counter-narcotics victory — must be avoided,” the institute claimed. “This is particularly true given the state of Afghanistan’s economy and the country’s humanitarian situation. Indeed, the ban imposes huge economic and humanitarian costs on Afghans and it is likely to further stimulate an outflow of refugees.”
