Afghanistan's Opium Nation: Drug Lords, Warlords, and Drug Wars
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If you look at a map of Afghanistan, you'll notice the area in the south-southwest where the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan meet. This region has been described as one of the most remote and lawless areas in the world. Unforgiving deserts and rocky outcroppings, some nearby mountain ranges. It's been home to a smuggler culture for centuries, with roots honed by the powerful and heavily armed tribes that inhabit the region. The drug trade has flourished here.

Some hash, but mostly opium, later refined into heroin by mobile labs that move around the mountains. It's provided jobs in a place where those are scarce, money where the people live in hopeless poverty. The thing about the opium industry is it's at once an incredibly destabilizing, but unfortunately also a stabilizing force.

It's also provided hundreds of millions of dollars for all sorts of less than desirable entities. Warlords, drug lords, insurgents, rebels, U.S. allies, U.S. enemies, and yes, the Taliban. There's a couple of wild characters who pretty much have been each one of those things at one point or another in their careers.

Then there's the Pakistani and Iranian and Tajik smuggler networks that have helped get it across borders. The various criminal syndicates in Turkey, the Balkans, Russian, Kurdish, and Central Asian traffickers who helped get it across more borders, all the way to the street crews in London, Scandinavia, and everywhere else. By donkey caravans, 100-car convoys through the desert, trucking syndicates, cargo ships through the Arabian Sea, planes, trains, and automobiles.

all have fed off of the opium poppy planted here in Afghanistan. So have the millions of heroin addicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and all over Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and Russia. The just-opposed president of Afghanistan once claimed that without drugs, the war would have been over long ago. But also, some of his allies and officials would have gone broke or not risen to power in the first place. For decades now, starting a few years even before the Taliban took power the first time around,

Afghanistan has dominated the world's opium and heroin market, in some years producing up to 90% of the global supply. This is the Underworld Podcast. Hello, I am Danny Gold and I am here with Sean Williams. Welcome to the podcast where we're going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to refine opium into heroin. We

We are reporters that have covered crime and conflict all over the world. And now we make this podcast about global organized crime. Step up. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of. I just want to give a shout out real quick to Dale Eisender, who is our audio producer. He scores all the music you hear himself. And it's, it makes me and Sean sound coherent. Even, you know, it takes a lot of talents and we don't, we don't give him enough appreciation. Also, Patreon.com.

We're going to keep that going. We have different tiers, different levels of support. That's where we put up bonus episodes, which are just interviews with experts, analysts, criminals. I interviewed a fentanyl dealer for one of them. Sean is speaking to a guy about crime in South Africa and gangs there, I think this week. We also put up scripts, sourceless scripts.

All that good stuff. I think we might even put up this one for free. You know, all the sourceless here because there's just so much up there. More importantly, the higher it goes...

the less Sean and I think about the wrong choices we've made in our lives. Yeah, that takes up a lot of my head space at the moment. If some people can drop us a few bucks, I'd be really good for my mental health. If we can free that up, the episodes, I think, would get a lot better. So today, we are talking opium and heroin in Afghanistan. We are staying topical. I don't think I've ever done more research for an episode. You know, I usually have like 15 or 20 pages of notes, but here I have 45. There's just so much good work going on.

Uh, that has been done on this, that, um, over the, especially over the past 20, 25 years. And, uh, it's not going to be like a great thorough rundown of the war, um, or any of the wars the last 40 years in Afghanistan, you know, definitely read the Afghanistan papers or anything written by Anand Gopal or, uh, or Matt Akins, if you're looking for, for more of that history. Yeah.

But we are going to talk about the history of opium and heroin in a country and the role that's played. So let's get going with that, right? Yeah, great. Patreon, Patreon, Patreon. Also, are there any Albanians in this show? Because we need some, right? We can work it in somehow with the Balkan trafficking networks. All right. All right. Yeah, we might lose people otherwise. Yeah. And what a role opium has played, you know, for most of the last 30 odd years, whether under the Taliban, with the American occupation, without either.

Afghanistan has produced the majority of the world's opium and heroin. We are talking, you know, usually between 80 and 90% in recent years, according to most estimates. Though, interestingly, very little of that comes into the US. Ours in recent decades has actually mostly come from Mexico and Colombia. Instead, the Afghanistan opium, the heroin, it floods Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Gulf, even Canada. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We got to go back, friends, to the 4th century BC.

When Alexander the Great is credited with bringing opium poppies to the region, despite him actually not conquering it, maybe because he was dipping into his own supplies. Who really knows? Oh, nice. We often do like a let's take it back a bit part of the start of these stories, but 2400 years. Nice work. Maybe I've got to do like...

Egyptian smugglers or something in the next episode. Arab traders are also said to have spread it into what's now India in the 7th century. And it doesn't really pop up as a crop being grown in Afghanistan until about the 18th century, according to Robert Draper in a 2011 article in Najio. Though it's easily grown in what's known as the Golden Crescent, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Iran has had opium growth and usage since the 11th century.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crimes says there's some evidence it was a traditional crop in Afghanistan from the 18th century on, though not a wide-scale cash crop, like not major cultivation or anything like that. And not much really happens with it until the middle of the 20th century. For example, in 1932, Afghanistan produces 75 tons of opium, which sounds like a lot, but China produces 6,000 tons.

And things actually slowed down a bit in Afghanistan by the mid-50s. It's only 12 tons that are being produced a year. And there's kind of a ban on it, but it's not really enforced. Wait, in Afghanistan or China? In Afghanistan, I didn't really see much more about China's growth of it around then. I'm pretty sure China stopped...

growing it at least as part of like an illicit economy around that era. Okay. Because it kind of, you'll see, you'll see where it ends up popping up. Interestingly, it's not really grown much in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, which later on becomes and still is the epicenter of opium production in the entire world. I mean, literally 40% of all the heroin in the world now originates in Helmand province.

The opium market then is mostly dominated by countries like India, Iran, Turkey, and later the infamous Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. The Chauvin actually bans it in 1955, but lifts the ban in 1969. You know, banning opium and then sort of lifting the ban is a constant theme we're going to see again and again in places where it's grown.

At the same time, there's something else going on in Afghanistan, something that violates one of the core rules I and any smart person bides by in their life, which is that you never follow a hippie to a second location. And by the way, never follow a white guy with dreads to a first location in any way. You know, that's a sub-law of that, a sub-principle of that, but it stands. You see...

The hippie trail gets going around the late 50s as the sort of counterculture and rebellious nature of the beatniks and hippies grows to captivate the impressional youth of America and England and all that. Young people would hit the road with like a backpack, maybe starting in London or Amsterdam, then hitting Istanbul, Goa, Bangkok, Lahore.

Tehran, Kathmandu, you know, shout out Kat Stevens. Saw him live once. It was incredible. Everyone's searching for enlightenment for themselves or whatever. You know, these are the days of like the Beatles having a guru and ashrams and all that sort of stuff. By the way, how the hell did Nora Jones end up making the music like she did?

I don't get it. What do you mean? She's Ravi Shankar's daughter. Ravi Shankar was the guy who the beat was a play with. The guy with all the poets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She ends up making like, like elevator music. It's nuts. I mean, her music is kind of delightful, dude. You know, don't, don't, don't try to bring it down. Old hippies like really remember this area in Afghanistan really fondly. Everything's cheap, peaceful, welcoming. And you know, they're also doing a ton of drugs.

Not just the opium, but some of the world's best hash. And there was an estimated 5,000 or 6,000 hippies in Kabul at this time, which, I mean, that's just too many hippies. Like, nothing good is going to come of that. It's really weird. Like, so many of these hippie boomers spent their 20s and early 30s just wandering the world.

on copious amounts of drugs and somehow emerged like 15 years later as just tight ends of the industry and high price lawyers and real estate magnets and all that sort of stuff. Like Tom Frustin, the guy who pretty much like helped launch MTV and later had a big C-suite role at Vice. He was living in Afghanistan selling carpets in the 70s. Like how do you go from that? I mean, that's just what happens when you switch up from hash to coke, I guess. Yeah.

The hash trade also gets going there during this time, like international hash trade. It kind of puts Afghanistan on the map for international trafficking networks that are just getting going in Pakistan and Iran, just across the border and things like that, which is according to Ikram Al-Haq in a 1996 paper on the history of the drug trade in the region. Of course, all that freewheeling love and drug use and all that and the hippies, you know, that's going to stop in Afghanistan really soon.

In the 1970s, things really start to heat up with the opium trade too for a number of reasons. In 1972, Turkey bans the growing of opium and Iran bans it again in 1979, Pakistan around the same time as well. And meanwhile, there's a drought in Burma and Thailand and Laos that's affecting all their crops. And this creates a huge opportunity in the market because these were the major growers at that time.

According to Gretchen Peters in a 2016 paper, quote,

which pushed poppy production across the Duran line. The Duran line is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's a wild, mountainous, somewhat lawless place and has been for centuries. Peters wrote these two monumental papers on the drug trade in 2009 and 2016 that

you know, just give a great history. I'm going to quote from them liberally. There's also a woman named Vonda Felba Brown, too, who has done extraordinary work. You know, I'm using a lot of her stuff here. And she's just an amazing analyst and researcher and journalist as well across the criminal world in general. So I definitely want to give those two women a shout out because their work is fantastic. Oh, yeah. And the Durand line is also one of those like random British decisions over time named after a guy called Mortimer Durand.

So yeah, it's always the Brits running around screwing it up with bad teeth, as you guys like to say. And also shout out to the man who would be king. This old movie with Michael Caine and Sean Connery, Rudyard Kipling book. It's really cool. Actually, they go off like exploring quite dated these days, but it's, it's pretty fun. So,

Afghanistan is ruled by King Zahir Shah. And just for the record, like I'm going to mispronounce a lot of, a lot of things. It's not like a sign of disrespect. I mispronounce English words all the time. You know, I can barely speak English. You'll hear me now. Talk to Dale. Like Dale will tell you, there's a lot of things here that, that go wrong.

If you subscribe to the Patreon, you can complain about my pronunciation. If not, you just have to deal with it. Nice. So the king, he rules Afghanistan for four decades and he follows a policy of non-alignment that plays both sides of the Cold War to get aid and development projects from the Soviets and the Americans. In 1973, though, his cousin, Mohammed Daoud, seizes power in a bloodless coup. He abolishes the monarchy and declares himself president. He declares a bunch of really good progressive reforms and

But he also starts to turn the country quite a bit upside down. He cracks down heavily on dissent, and he essentially becomes an authoritarian, which inspires the first makings of a rural resistance. So much so that in 1975, a group of Islamists try to stage a coup, but they fail.

And then in 1978, Afghanistan's Communist Party launches the Saar Revolution, a bloody coup where they murder Khan and more than a dozen of his family members. The regime that takes over is incredibly repressive, you know, torturing, murdering, imprisoning tens of thousands. And I'm borrowing a lot of this summary from Afghan journalist Emran Feroz. He wrote a bunch of great articles for New Line's magazine. He kind of breaks it down really concisely, more so than anything I've read.

The regime is headed by Noor Mohammed Taraki and his right-hand man, Hafizullah Amin. Oh, yeah. These guys are bad bitches. They're bad. Yeah, just not in the good way. I mean, this is a Soviet-backed communist regime, which is just brutal, like mass graves brutal. Even to the point where the Soviets are like, guys, you know, you got to turn it down a few notches, okay? Because you're just completely destroying any legitimacy that the government has and bad things are going to happen. But of course, they don't.

Amin ends up killing his mentor, Taraki, a few years later, and the repression just goes into overdrive and everything is bloody and awful. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing across the border into Pakistan.

Things are getting increasingly ugly, and on Christmas Eve of 1979, the Soviets launch an invasion, they kill Amin, and install their puppet leader. According to Feroz, quote, this happened contrary to a widespread and contemporary belief that CIA involvement provoked the invasion. According to some sources, the U.S. government started helping Mujahideen rebels a few months before the Soviet invasion. Yet the military intervention was a direct consequence of the actions of the allied communist regime in Kabul itself.

whose unmitigated brutality threatened to destabilize communist rule in Afghanistan, causing problems along the southern and potentially volatile border of the Soviet Union. And this is like really turning into a rural versus metropolitan thing, right? Like, I don't think you hear enough about the differences between cities and isolated places in Afghanistan, like driving loads of the divides today. Yeah, I've kind of seen that brought up recently. I think Anand Gopal actually talks about that too, and his work there is incredible. But I forget, you actually...

You reported in Afghanistan, didn't you? Yeah, I was back there five years ago. So 2016, I spent like a few weeks out. I did this really cool story for Esquire about MMA. This guy who does an MMA tournament tries to bring kids from different tribes together. And so they can win and lose with like pride instead of shooting the shit out of each other. I had a great time out there. It's like just really sad what's happening now. And I've been trying to get that guy out actually, because he's in a lot of trouble. So yeah.

Yeah. Shout out to Kakao. I hope he gets across the Pakistani border. Yeah. It's kind of a volatile man. It's really bad. Now this is when the anti-government resistance factions really start to rise up. They're

They're often headed by tribal leaders or newly established warlords. You know, some of these groups are Islamists, very similar to the Muslim Brotherhood. Others aren't. And they weren't really super unified. You know, they just wanted to bring down this repressive government. And to clarify a lot of like the dumb shit that you see on Twitter, TikTok, whatever, none of these groups were the Taliban. OK, the Taliban didn't exist until the 90s.

And some of these groups actually ended up fighting them. Yeah, I think Gopal's book, No Good Men Among the Living, is great for this stuff. Like all of this agrarian Islamic Pashtun code culture in Afghanistan sets the foundations for what's going on now. His book's amazing. Also, none of these groups either were Bin Laden and his boys. Like they only really emerged as a force later in the war, I think in the mid 80s. And if I remember Steve Cole and Lawrence Wright correctly, they weren't that big of a group.

They were generally pretty shitty fighters. They didn't receive any American funding, and they didn't do too much in the war effort besides establishing this reputation as being fearless in a way. These anti-government groups, these resistant groups,

became known as the Mujahideen, they got support that would grow to billions of dollars from different places, China, Iran, the Saudis, Western Europe, a lot from Pakistan, and of course, the infamous Operation Cyclone, where the CIA supported various Mujahideen groups to take on the Soviets through Pakistani middlemen. Danny, are you saying that the truth of Afghanistan is actually quite complex? Because reading social media, that is not what people are saying.

It's so complex that I'm very nervous about getting a lot of stuff wrong. So yeah, a lot to look into there, which is why I think I'm going to make the source list completely open. Are you still with me? Like I promise we're getting to the heroin soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you. Now, things that started picking up in the late 70s, so much so that the DEA was paying attention pre-Soviet invasion. But there's a number of reasons why the opium growth really shoots up in the 80s. And we'll start simple and keep moving from there.

The Soviets are just hammering the country, brutally destroying the infrastructure, the economy, agricultural crops, everything. Mind you, it's already a poor country that needs serious development and aid help.

Rural farmers had grown pistachios, almonds, grapes, pomegranates, even cotton. But that's all quite hard to keep going in the middle of a relentless bombing campaign where farms are destroyed, livestock killed, you know, all that sort of stuff. Part of the Soviet strategy was to starve the Mujahideen and their supporters, so they deliberately went after crops and these sort of things. From a 2009 Gretchen Peters paper, quote, "...the Soviet scorched-earth policy destroyed thousands of acres of farmland."

and sent millions of refugees over the border to Iran and Pakistan, leaving fewer people to work on the remaining arable fields. Yeah, as that war, that war was just brutal. Like, as the Soviets got increasingly desperate and they were doing, they were doing pretty despicable stuff on the battlefield. I remember when I was researching it, one story I read was about them planting bombs in children's toys and just disperse them around the country. Pretty messed up stuff. Yeah, yeah. And don't worry, we're going to get to the, you know, the horrible stuff that American allies did as well.

Vanda Felba Brown in a 2013 paper for the National Bureau of Asian Research says, quote, those Soviet forces were able to control the major cities. They never succeeded in controlling the countryside where they could not distinguish insurgents from the rural population. Sounds familiar. As a result, Moscow ultimately resorted to a scorched earth policy of systematically destroying agricultural production and infrastructure in Afghanistan, including orchards and irrigation systems to drive the population out of the countryside and into the cities.

Yet since agriculture represented the predominant segment of the overall economy, the population was not able to cope economically in the cities and instead switched to opium poppy cultivation in the countryside. And here's the thing about opium and why it's great for times like these. It's super easy to grow. It's reliable. It doesn't need much water. It once harvested,

It keeps for a lengthy period of time, unlike most produce you can grow. And since you can store it and it keeps, you can use it as credit or money, and it's used as that still in super poor areas. Like the hex of the pre-internet age, am I right? I mean, that's crypto Sean's talking about, and it's so weird, and I don't even know what it is. And you know things are bad if Sean's the one getting involved in like foolhardy crypto. It's up 20 bucks today. 20 bucks. It always is. Until it's not.

The Mujahideen, those fighting the Soviets, they did their fair share of fighting and destroying things as well, of course. Now, it wasn't all of them, but some of them also did their share, the lion's share, really, of growing and smuggling opium.

I'm quote-heavy this episode again because there's so much good work on it. Says Peters, quote, a multi-party, multinational insurgent force known as the Mujahideen received military training, logistical support, and safe haven in neighboring Pakistan, as well as billions of dollars in covert funding from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

The resistance lasted nine years, during which fighting destroyed much of the country's limited agricultural infrastructure and roadways, prompting growing numbers of poor farmers to plant poppy, a sturdy crop that requires little irrigation and does not rot. Certain commanders sought to establish financial independence by deepening their involvement in the herring trade.

For example, Nassim Akhundzada, whose control includes the fertile Helmand Valley, enforced opium production quotas for poppy farmers and truck drug shipments into neighboring Iran, where he could fetch higher wholesale prices. Gulbadin Hekmatyar and Yunus Khalis, two fundamentalist commanders in eastern Afghanistan, operated heroin labs in the border areas and ran transport and bus companies as a cover for moving narcotics and cash. Oof.

Hekmatyai's that is another bad bitch this episode's high on the bad bitch count actually yeah these guys are they're bad news I also I was looking up what Mujahideen means and it's just like a plural of Mujahideen which is like someone who does jihad basically so is that yeah like a holy warrior holy warrior yeah yeah not all of them were fundamentalist fundamentalist though that sort of name becomes the catch all yeah

You see, when the war first starts, there actually isn't a ton of money coming in yet. These guys are fighting this mighty Soviet army and they need more resources. And sure, they've got some of that foreign funds coming in right now, but they turn to opium growth to make more money.

Some of the more powerful warlords and tribal leaders that are fighting the Soviets, they really start going with the opium production, start funding these groups, even issuing a fatwa that says it's halal, which, you know, means it's okay. I mean, I guess the Hadith said that you're not allowed to get high yourself, right? So growing it is cool. Totally fine fatwa, in my opinion. It's got my Islamic seal of approval. You know, it's just one of those, it's...

a thing that all religions do where you find those loopholes to me, you know, like, uh, like, like with super religious Jews and finding someone else to turn the lights on on Saturday, you know, you find, you find the loopholes when you really need to, you find those loopholes.

At the same time, again, the Golden Triangle is pretty much, you know, really slowing down with opium and heroin. So the market wide open and expands, especially in Southern Helmand. Yeah. I mean, in the Golden Triangle, when the wire state starts shifting into crazy pills, you can just see the rates of production over there for opium just plummet. I'm surprised the Afghans didn't get into their meth, actually. Everyone loves meth. Spoiler alert. That's part two. I think towards the end, there's increasing talks of, you

you know, pharmaceutical drugs that are being made in Afghanistan now. I don't know if it's huge yet. You know, there's some research out there that we'll talk about later on, but yeah, it's a thing that's happening. Opium growth in the early mid-80s, it's almost doubling every year in Afghanistan. Big landowners and drug lords, they're also paying the Mujahideen to protect their drug shipments, according to Peters, and that money is pouring into the fighting. And what to do with all that opium when you're growing it? Well, you

Well, you take advantage of this big Afghan network of refugees across the border in Pakistan and the Pakistani network of smugglers who had been taking stuff, all sorts of stuff back and forth across that border, you know, for generations. So yeah, the Pakistani smugglers, the drug campings. See, it wasn't the CIA coming through, you know, holding up stacks of cash like they were a phone or just dropping off crates of guns directly into the people's hands. The CIA was working through the Pakistani military and the ISI, which is their intelligence agency.

who already had a reputation of being hopelessly corrupt and profiting handsomely off the drug trade. And that's before this market really took off like it does now. I mean, things were so corrupt, it went all the way to the top. Governors, high-ranking military officials, even the prime minister's right-hand man. All the smugglers were under their protection. So they would take the U.S. weapons and cash into Afghanistan, and then they would take the opium out.

You know, and they got real smart and innovative and built a bunch of refining labs on the border. And soon they were turning all that opium into heroin. It takes 10 kilos of opium to produce one kilo of heroin. And the heroin is much easier to transport and more valuable. You know, no one is on street corners in Marseille, like asking for a bag of opium. You're not going to the right clubs, my man.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, there's definitely probably a little bit of that there, but it's probably not probably somewhere on yachts and things like that. I don't think the market for opium is huge in these countries. Opium mega yachts. To elaborate further, you know, Pakistan's ISI, they were the ones parsing out a lot of the foreign funding that was coming from the US. And some of the warlords that didn't get a large cut from that, they needed other means. Others just wanted even more cash to fund their fighters.

According to Matt Akins, in a 2014 Rolling Stone article, Matt's fantastic journalist, friend of the pod, been reporting on Afghanistan for more than a decade. Quote, large-scale cultivation was introduced in Helmand by Mullah Nassim Akunzaza, the guy I mentioned earlier, Mujahideen commander who was receiving support from the ISI and the CIA. USAID's irrigated farmlands were perfect for cash crop production.

And as he wrested control of territory from the communist government, he introduced production quotas and offered cash advances to farmers who planted opium. Yeah. Akins is so good, man. He did a, he did a great Harper's piece too around that time on the gangs of Karachi. And that touches on some of this stuff too. It's really, really good. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I'll call it. He's, he's doing great work there now. I think he's been on the, he's still there reporting on the front page of the times, everything that's going on. But,

But the mention of the USAID thing there is really interesting. Remember earlier when I talked about how in the 50s and 60s, Afghanistan followed that non-alignment policy and both the Soviet Union and the US poured in money for development projects? The US had built irrigation infrastructure in Helmand for growing crops, and these helped out a lot with

with growing opium, even though a bunch of it was destroyed. So even now, you know, people say that they're still using some of that immigration infrastructure to grow opium, which is really interesting when you think about it. And the cash advances thing too, that becomes a huge thing for farmers, especially poor farmers, you know, who don't have the resources every year to put money into growing stuff. If they're getting cash advances, that's really appealing.

As these warlords took on more and more territory, you know, Hekmatyar, they started getting heroin money too, even eventually fighting each other for drug control, whether it was trafficking routes or crops and everything like that. Hekmatyar even set up his own heroin labs on the border with the big time Pakistani smuggling networks.

Says Peters, quote, the Mujahideen's involvement in the poppy trade was cause for concern. More worrisome still were the Pakistani military's links to heroin trafficking. 70% of the world's supply of high-grade heroin was produced in or smuggled through Pakistan by 1984, according to European police estimates. There was widespread evidence that the covert pipeline run by the ISI, which brought weapons and material by truck and donkey to the Afghan guerrillas, funneled out vast amounts of heroin.

In 1986, two Pakistani military commanders were arrested with over 200 kilos of pure heroin and then released. What? Yeah.

So because the Pakistani networks had the heroin processing going on and the widespread corruption, and these labs were in tribal areas with little federal government oversight, the government of Pakistan just was hesitant to act. And the Americans weren't about to do anything either, as we'll discuss in a bit. Also, a lot of the Pakistani officials were making a ton of money off it and just kind of feared retribution if they did do something.

One of the main players in the Pakistani network is a gentleman by the name of Ayub Afridi, who became infamous for having one of the largest houses in the world, the villa in the Khyber Pass, and also being used by and eventually arrested by inside the United States. And I'm going to do a whole episode about him eventually. But he came from a big smuggling network background. And he was one of the main guys who collaborated with the Pakistani government to take weapons into Afghanistan while bringing out opium to be processed to heroin and then trafficked.

I mean, I reckon a villa in the Khyber Pass is a pretty big red flag to some drug lord being around, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. The Afridi tribe is also one of the most successful cricket families in the world, by the way. But yeah, we won't do a whole episode on that. Don't worry.

We can do a little segue, I think, in the episode on him for you. Don't worry. I'll find one. So where was the CIA in all this, right? While some of their ostensible main allies were fighting the Soviets tooth and nail, but also growing and trafficking large amounts of heroin.

Well, they had what one would call euphemistically a hands-off approach. It's your basic Cold War, I'm going to look the other way on the bad shit you're doing as long as you keep fighting the right guy story. Oh, right. Okay, so I was looking at Twitter and I thought the Cold War was just good guys fighting bad guys and it was pretty simple, right? So the U.S. officials that were working in Pakistan ignored and even suppressed indications that their Mujahideen groups and the Pakistani military were up to their neck in trafficking, says Peters. She goes further, quote,

The Washington Post reported in 1990 that U.S. diplomats received but declined to investigate firsthand accounts that Afghan guerrillas and ISI agents protect and participate in heroin trafficking. Former officials posted to the U.S. mission in Pakistan now acknowledge that they routinely receive reports that the Mujahideen profited from opium, but now admit that they did not follow up on the reports, lest narcotics distract from the central mission. Then she quotes someone called Edwin McWilliams, who was a U.S. special envoy to the resistance in the late 80s.

You have to put yourself in the mindset of the period. There was one single objective, defeating the Soviets. Raising issues like Hikmah and the ISI's involvement in the drug trade was on no one's agenda. The Post article from 1990, it also says the U.S. didn't act against the Pakistani smugglers because they didn't want to antagonize their allies, the Pakistani military establishment and the ISI.

I cited this paper before. It's an October 1996 paper by Ikramul Haq about the trafficking that was going on. It details how crazy the heroin issue got in Pakistan in the 80s, which went from a few thousand addicts to millions in the span of like a decade. It also talks about how gnarly the drug mafias got in Pakistan. They were even connected to General Zia, Pakistan's president, who died mysteriously in a plane crash in 1988. You know, if I was a young journalist now, and I'm still really young, um,

I would rock up in Pakistan. Like, basket case corruption, gangs, wars, loads of English they speak. I mean, hop on a flight to Karachi if you're a young journalist. That's like a serious tip. If I was a young journalist now, I would learn to code, but that's another conversation.

By 1990, even Time Magazine is running articles about how the CIA was suffering from diplomatic embarrassment because their former allies, like Hekmatyar, were now big-time drug lords. Haack calls it, quote, complicity in the drug dealing of covert action assets, not in most instances any direct capability. Now, one would assume, though, that if you're responsible for all this happening, you would kind of take a role even after your objectives are accomplished. But, you know, that doesn't exactly happen, as we'll see.

In 1989, the Soviets pull out, defeated, and so does the world's attention and the foreign aid money from the U.S.,

Among others. So what we have now is a destroyed country, power vacuum, where the main industries are war, opium and trafficking. Various warlord drug lords who have risen up and control their own little statelet fiefdoms, their own money making operations and their own small armies. And just the shitload of opium and heroin that goes with it, which is just, you know, it's not it's not good. No, but I mean, I'm sure things are going to go swimmingly for Afghanistan from this point on, right?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's also, like I said, when the U.S. sort of pulls their attention away instead of doing, I don't know, anything to rein in these kind of drug lords that they helped create. Quoting now from that 2013 paper from the National Bureau of Asian Research, sponsorship of the drug economy allowed these commanders to ride to the top of Afghanistan's power brokers.

It allowed them to supplement U.S. aid via ISI and Soviet aid with income from drugs to build strong armies and to withstand the collapse of U.S. aid at the end of 1980s. Even more significantly, such sponsorship also allowed Mujahideen commanders to develop political capital with the population in the areas they controlled by giving them the ability to deliver economic subsistence during a time of dire economic stress. This political capital further contributed to the demise of the traditional tribal notables and landowners in Afghanistan. The

legitimized the rise of the Mujahideen commanders as the new elites, and consolidated their regional and tribal dominance. In other words, first you get the opium, then you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the respect. Why was I just thinking of the underpants gnomes then as well? See, that doesn't fit though, because there actually are steps here and everything makes sense. There's no question marks here on why things turned out the way they did.

So 1989, there's still a communist government in Kabul just without the Soviet military really backing them. And the warlords are fighting amongst each other over the spoils of war on opium and the government. Though in 1992, they're finally able to take Kabul. Now, some reports put it as 91, others as 93. But in the early 90s, Afghanistan does take the lead as the top opium producing country in the world. Heroin and opium, they now make up an integrated significant part of the economy. You know, they're the powerful drug mafias on both sides of the border that are running things.

And these various warlord Mujahideen groups, they try to form a coalition government in the newly declared Islamic State of Afghanistan.

But this doesn't go well in no small part due to opium trafficker Gubaldi and Hekmatar. And this leads to a particularly lawless period in Afghanistan, rife with just banditry and all sorts of heinous violence committed against civilians. And people are just looking for anything or anyone to rein in this out-of-control situation. I'm not going too far into it, but these groups were notoriously brutal as well. And so much so that Afghan civilians...

they started turning their attention and their support to a group of young students reared in the Afghan refugee camp Madrasas of Pakistan, otherwise known as the Taliban. The Taliban rise up in 1994, and they start taking territory from the thieving and fighting warlord drug lords like right away. And they have some support from the ISI and Pakistan as well as the Afghan population because everyone is just tired of the fighting and the constant war. Again, like some of the themes that we're talking about here, you know, you can kind of see

really strong similarities with how things are going right now. So cyclical. And the Taliban, they form some important coalitions and get additional seed funding with what I guess you would call the merchant class who are tied to the warlordism disrupting business. This includes the trucking and trading powerhouses who could be considered mafias in a way. And of course, the powerful opium growers and smugglers.

Peters calls it an unholy alliance of drug smugglers, traders, and trucking groups. Yeah, this sounds like it's going to go really well. One of the main initial sponsors of the Taliban was a prominent trader whose clan controlled tens of millions of dollars worth of poppy fields. By 1995, 1996, though they were getting money everywhere, winning some territories without even fighting, seen as protectors, they were making deals with more prominent tribal drug lords.

They made promises not to crack down on opium, though in 1994 they initially said they were going to ban it, but they pulled back shortly after. A few forces also said that they did institute a ruling not to grow opium again in 1997, but it was mostly ignored. There's also other stories about the Taliban saying it was okay to grow in Afghanistan, but not use, and only if you were selling it to the infidels. And

And there's a wild urban legend of opium bricks or heroin bricks on the border with Pakistan having stamps that say something like, not for use by Muslims. I mean, see, look, me and the Taliban, man, we've got our Quranic dogma down. By 1998, the Taliban control most roads, airports, population centers, and importantly, big border crossings into the country. And they're also laying taxes on opium growers, opium smugglers, refining labs, taxes that help them stay in charge.

In fact, opium output skyrockets under the Taliban. In 1996, Afghanistan grows 2,248 metric tons. And in 1998, that had jumped to 4,581 tons. So we're seeing it right there. It doubles under the Taliban, right?

Now, this is the only place I've been able to find mention of this. It's a 2018 political article based on leaked classified U.S. intelligence, though it blends with sort of everything else that I've seen. Quote, at a June 1998 summit, the Klan leaders gathered secretly to approve another alliance with the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time, according to classified U.S. intelligence cited in Operation Reciprocity legal documents. Under the quote, sincere agreement,

The drug lords pledged their financial support for the Taliban in exchange for protection of their vast swaths of poppy and cannabis fields, drug processing labs and storage facilities. That's starting to sound slightly less Islamic. Yeah. But just the idea of something being called the sincere agreement makes me like a little skeptical. But, you know, I mean, well done for well done for saying Operation Reciprocity as well. That's a horrible phrase.

So there were major traffickers on the Taliban's ruling council. And the opium traders who didn't want to play ball, they got dealt with. So fast forward to 1999, the Taliban is getting paid off the opium and heroin game, but they crave something else, international legitimacy. And they're getting pressure from the United Nations, among others, to crack down on the drug trade. That is, if they want the recognition and the aid money that comes with it. Is that real estate? Are we there? No, we're not there yet.

So some reports say that it was the 1999-2000 growing season. Others say that the ban goes into effect in July of 2000. But the Taliban go ahead and issue a fatwa declaring cultivating opium in their territory haram. And they enforce it like only the Taliban can. It's wildly successful in the short term, like some of the most successful anti-drug efforts ever. As you may have heard, the Taliban do not fuck around when it comes to imposing punishments for transgressions. Mm-hmm.

cultivation declines by something absurd like 90 and according to peters there's some unintended consequences for that as well quote the ban created a humanitarian crisis by leaving thousands of small farmers and sharecroppers without income but there's another theory too one that says that this was part of some drug lord market manipulations to drive the prices up see once the bans happens the price shoots up in country from 28 a cave opium to 400 and the taliban

They had a nice stockpile. Remember, opium keeps. Peters again, quote, some Western Afghan officials have concluded that the poppy ban was the ultimate insider trading act. The UN-affiliated Narcotics Control Board concluded that after four years of bumper crops, stocks of Afghan heroin were big enough to supply the European market for four more years.

More than a half dozen well-placed tribal sources and Afghan officials interviewed for this project said senior Taliban leaders and Haji Bashar al-Nurzai purchased massive amounts of opiums just before the ban. It wasn't religion, said a Qaeda-based smuggler. It was just business. They bought load. They sold high. You know, there's like a GameStop or a crypto or some sort of insider trading joke to make here, but honestly, it just feels like low-hanging fruit. It's almost like a Sean joke, you know? Hey, I'm...

Doing those jokes ironically. The ban, of course, also allows them to crack down on the competition. And according to some, farmers actually start disobeying it in the spring of 2001, and the Taliban allegedly revoke it in September.

It decimated the economy, pissed off too many people, including the locals that they count on for support. But yeah, of course, something else happens in September of 2001, that's due to the Taliban. They kill the line of Panjshir. Ahmed Shah Massoud, hero of Afghanistan, leader of the resistance. And then two days later, the towers come down. The U.S. declares war. And that's going to throw this whole opium heroin thing on just on a wild journey. But that, alas, we'll have to wait until next week.

That's right. It's a two-parter. Things are going to get weird next week. We're going to go into all sorts of fun, awful, awful things. Yeah, cue the Afghan war cliffhanger music, Dale. I'm excited for that. And also, just before we close out on this one, do you know where else some of the Afghan opium made its way to? Where? Albania.

Yeah. Anyway, thank you guys again. Patreon support. Oh yeah. Actually next week is going to be the second part of the bottom line off thing. We're doing a little split thing and we're going to see, we're going to see how that works out. But if you made it this far, thank you. And we'll see you guys. We'll see you guys next week.

This Is Monsters is a true crime podcast and YouTube channel where I tell the stories of the worst people on the planet. Though the stories of the victims are told, we focus on the monster who carried out the evil act. The show is split into seasons, and each season has a theme. In Season 1, we covered cases of filicide, which is the act of a parent killing their own child. In Season 2, we covered cases of people killing for love.

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