Un year after the American debacle in Kabul, the “new” Taliban, now in unchallenged power, have left no illusions about the still aggressive rigor of their ideology and the moral order that results from it through daily repression. Admittedly, they consistently present themselves as engaged in the international fight against terrorism, due to the deadly conflict that opposes them to the local branch of the Islamic State organization (IS). But they continue to maintain solid relations with Al-Qaeda, whose leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, has just been killed, in the middle of Kabul, in an American strike on his residence.
There is, however, a crucial dimension on which these “new” Taliban broke with the practice of their predecessors, who controlled Kabul and the vast majority of Afghan territory from 1996 to 2001: it is the question of poppies, of which Mullah Omar had , successfully outlawed cultivation in July 2000.
fatwa of prohibition
The poppy is planted in the fall so that the juice from its plant, from which the opium is derived, is harvested in the spring. The fatwa of the “Commander of the Faithful”, as Mullah Omar had proclaimed himself, had an immediate impact on the whole of the Taliban territory, leading to a collapse in opium production in 2001, and therefore a drying up of flows global heroin markets, of which Afghanistan was already the main source.
The brutality of such a prohibition contributed not a little to weakening the rural roots of the Taliban regime, unable to resist for more than a few weeks the offensive led by the United States in October 2001. During their patient reconquest of power , two decades long, the “new” Taliban meditated on the lesson of such a devastating prohibition for the peasant base of their movement. In the regions gradually coming under their control, they organized the taxation of poppy cultivation and the trafficking of opiates, without generally taking charge of the narcotics production chain themselves.
The most prominent drug lords nevertheless continued to collaborate with the authorities in Kabul, then under the protection of the United States. As early as 2006, the UN was concerned that “Afghanistan is moving from a narco-economy to a narco-state”. The historical record of 8,200 tonnes of opium produced in 2007 was beaten in 2017, with 9,000 tonnes, mainly originating from government areas. It is moreover, in the summer of 2021, the attack of the Taliban on the richest provinces 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 astounding windfall, while international sanctions and a severe drought have already plunged the countryside into a lasting depression. According to the UN, the areas cultivated with poppy for the 2020-2021 season are around 177,000 hectares, for opium production estimated in 2021 at 6,800 tonnes, up 8% compared to 2020. Also according to the UN, revenues from opiates are estimated in 2021 at between 1.8 and 2.7 billion dollars, or 6 to 11% of Afghan GDP.
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