Taliban Heroin Gang and the Failed War on Afghanistan's Opium
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Summer 2014. An early morning raid on a two-car convoy in the lawless and arid landscape of southern Afghanistan. Afghan special ops are in a helicopter, and they've zeroed in on the cars. This is a popular superhighway, as the New York Times article calls it, for smugglers of all types and insurgents. It connects Nimru's province, a big transshipment point for all sorts of contraband, with Helmand province, where over 50% of Afghanistan's opium is concentrated.

Depending on the year, the numbers fluctuate. But by most estimates, this would have it mean that around 40% of the world's heroin supply originates in Helmand Province these days. 40%. And that's all of the heroin on Earth. It varies over the years, but most estimates in the last few decades put the total amount of heroin originating in Afghanistan at between 80% to 95%. Though I should add that very little of the U.S.'s heroin supply comes from there. That's mostly from Mexico, Colombia, and even Guatemala.

But the Afghan special ops teams are focused on these two cars. They fire a few tracer rounds and cause the cars to come to a sharp stop. When the raid is finished, they've confiscated a bunch of weapons, nearly a ton of opium. I don't mean ton as like shorthand for a lot. I mean a literal ton. The men in the cars are taken into custody. And one of them, a 40-year-old, gives a fake name and claims to be a carpet seller, which I mean like, fair play.

It takes weeks, but they eventually figure out he's actually Mullah Abdul Rashid Baloch, the Taliban's shadow commander for numerous provinces. A man infamously known for orchestrating a mass suicide attack during Ramadan. Now, though, he wasn't just a Taliban leader. He was also a super powerful drug lord. He's tried, convicted, and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

This is the other surprising thing here, because in Afghanistan during the war, many of the top drug lords, whether they were Taliban affiliated or affiliated with the government or serving as actual officials in the government allied with the U.S., are all too often freed or immediately let go, despite all sorts of evidence, the high uproars they play in the country's rapidly growing opium trade.

In fact, some of the high-level Afghan officials tasked with fighting the drug war were drug lords themselves. This is the Underworld Podcast. Welcome back, everyone. This is Danny Gold, and I'm here with Sean Williams. Hello. This is the podcast where we encourage you never to talk about prices over devices, and also we delve into the world of transnational organized crime as only two journalists who have covered this stuff can.

As always, support the Patreon, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. You give us $5 a month, you'll get all the bonus interviews that we've done, which like there's a new one every week almost. Tons, yeah. $10 will get you scripts and all the source lists, so on and so on. If you get it up to like 50 or 100, I will personally force Sean to mule whatever you need across borders and airports. It doesn't matter.

No disagreements there, Sean? You can, I mean, for $200, you can pick the orifice that it stays in. Jesus Christ. Anyway, welcome back. We are continuing this week with our theme of opium and Afghanistan. We're going to be going through, you know, our Taliban heroin gang and the American war and occupation. The last one, if you go back two weeks, kick us through the origin story of Afghanistan's opium nation from ancient times, through the Russian war, the emergence of the Taliban, all the way up to September 11th.

And what a fine time it was. Thank you to everyone who wrote in and let us know they really dug the episode. And again, reminder, this isn't going to be like a thorough examination of the war. For that, you should probably read the recently released Afghanistan papers or Anand Gopal's book. No, this is about drugs. Wait, what else did we pot about?

There are variations, but mostly it's about drugs and all the fun stuff that comes with it. And that opening anecdote, that's from a big two-part New York Times series by Azam Ahmed. It's really great work. I think it was released in 2016. And the man he talks about there, interestingly enough, was released in 2019, not through good old-fashioned bribery or threats, but through a prisoner exchange over a bunch of kidnapped Indian engineers that were taken hostage by the Taliban in

Side note, though, I really think I could be good at like these hostage exchange negotiators for this sort of stuff. If that career path is open, I honestly think, yeah, I feel like I can see both sides a lot. You know, it's a good skill to have. Oh, OK. Well, you reckon you could renegotiate a deal for this podcast then?

Yeah, that's a skill that I don't have. Anyway, yeah, that Patreon is up and running. But yes, we're going to work our way through the last 20 years of Afghanistan's opium industry. The industry, the US spent like $9 billion or $8 billion trying to shut down and just failed miserably.

Did they really, really try to shut it down? Like, really? I mean, at some points they did, but as we'll see, it's complicated and that wasn't the original focus. And even shutting it down, if it was the focus, you know, it's not as simple as it seems because there's a lot of different intricacies that go into it. And one thing I really didn't get to dive into in the last episode was

was the networks that take this heroin and opium and spread it out all around the world. So I just want to do a quick rundown of that. There's a great GAO report from 2000 that looks into them. And obviously, some things on the ground have changed since then, but I think a lot of it still stands. And we kind of broke down how a lot of it moves over the border into Pakistan, into Iran, or taking the northern route through Tajikistan. This report says the Pakistan route is mainly trafficked in cargo containers by ARC, you know, after getting up there in trucks, submarines,

sometimes using ports in African cities as stops, before heading to Western Europe and the UK. Now, the route through Iran primarily uses trucks to keep going through Turkey, where it can head through the Balkans before spreading into Europe. That goes through Albania? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it always does. It always does. An Interpol report describes the route going through Russia. Some choice quotes...

Two primary routes are used to smuggle heroin, the Balkan route, which runs through southeastern Europe, and the Silk route, which runs through Central Asia.

The anchor port for the Balkan route is Turkey, which remains a major staging area and transportation route for heroin destined for European markets. And also, although the Balkan route is considered the primary supply line for Western Europe, Afghan and Central Asian traffickers smuggle heroin along the Silk Route into Russia, the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and all other parts of Europe. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan are vital transit countries.

We should do a whole episode on that mad Turkmenistani president. I wrote his name down. I'm going to try and say it right now. Give it a go. Gubanguli Berdimuhamedov.

Is that it? This guy hunts on horseback, builds statues of his dogs, did a rap tune with his grandson a few years back. He's incredible. We're going to do a show on him. Episode 2050. I feel like that's a joint Robert Evans production. But yeah, basically, heroin goes through every country, everywhere. I mean, that's my takeaway. And it's just a whole lot of smack everywhere. In fact, by 2001, Iran and Pakistan were estimated to have the largest proportion of drug users in the world. Okay.

according to an international crisis group report. With Central Asia really catching up, all of this because the Afghanistan opium heroin routes just goes right through them. It's an interesting question, too, when you think about Mexico, Colombia, and cocaine users. Don't get me wrong, I've had some nights out in Colombia, and the Colombians, they definitely love to hoover their fair share of schnief, but I'm pretty sure the US and London are leading the way with that.

Oh, by a mile. If you go to the guys' toilets at halftime at an English football match, like, more guys are doing snow there than in Berghain. It's insane. Everyone. I wonder, I mean, I'm sure there are reports on it that I just didn't look up what the usage levels are like in Colombia and in Mexico. Yeah. So that'll be our homework for next time. And another thing I found interesting, though, about this heroin trade was just how segmented it is, right? Yeah.

With the U.S., you had maybe the Colombians to the Mexicans, some Dominicans, then to distribution in the U.S. But with this heroin, like, although I guess when it goes, cocaine goes into West Africa and Europe, it's similar. But with the heroin, it just, it passes through so many countries. So there's so many different people getting a little bite there.

In 2013, Vanda Felba Brown, who I quote a lot, described the networks like this, quote,

The Russian mafia and military, members of Central Asian governments and law enforcement, the Chinese triads, and Balkan smuggling outfits, having a piece of the trade in their territories, while organized crime groups in Western and Eastern Europe dominate distribution in consumer countries. So how is everyone making money on this, like, Brazilian country drug run? Like, each border, a guard...

Each stop, a policeman. Every time, unloaded, reloaded. I don't... It's just so many people. There's so many parts in play. Yeah, I mean, the value just goes up and up and up. And obviously, the price goes up and up and up. And we pay. You get these kilos in Afghanistan, and they're a couple hundred dollars. And then it just keeps going up and up and up until it reaches your...

you know, your, um, your customer when it's gone through so many levels and the price is definitely higher than, uh, well, a lot higher than, than what it is. I mean, it's, it's fascinating to think about how that transport breaks down, how the money breaks down, who is doing the deals and making moves with who, and just how that price gets inflated. But yeah, back to the timeline. We left off right when nine 11 happens, uh,

The Taliban had banned opium cultivation, though some say it was a manipulative effort to juice the price or that they had plenty of opium stocks already in play that they were holding on to and they were just trying to gain international legitimacy. One report says they'd actually pulled back on the ban shortly before the towers were hit. But as soon as September 11th hits and the realization sets in that the U.S. is going to go after the Taliban, the opium, it just gets going again. Wait, so how come like trying to buy weapons and stuff?

No, I think it's more that vacuum of power, right? And people realized the Taliban weren't going to be focused on this or the Taliban had to stop caring about it because they're never going to get international legitimacy now. I mean, again, these are assumptions. You know, right before September 11th, the price of a kilo of opium in the area is at

At a high of $746, a month after the attack, it drops to less than $100, either because people were dumping their stock or the growing season was expected to be huge. And again, the assumption is with the Taliban on the run, some of the old farmers and drug lords started openly planting again as planting season was nearing.

allegedly, according to Gretchen Peters, who again is a woman who we quote a ton because her papers were fantastic. When the bombing started in October, September of 2001, George W. Bush had met with his National Security Council and been encouraged by the Pentagon to hit some major opium producing targets. But in the end, they declined to do so because of a fear, you know, of pissing off the local population and creating a lot of collateral damage. Oh, good job. They started that plan for the war. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't really kind of seem silly to say that was a consideration back then. But yeah, apparently the British were pushing for these bombing runs because so much of England's heroin was coming from Afghanistan. And the CIA estimated it could have done some serious damages to the shortly resurgent opium trade. But yeah, it just wasn't, it wasn't a consideration then, right? The consideration was going after the Taliban and all that. So when the US comes in in 2001, they need allies on the ground to take on the Taliban.

And they mostly partner with anti-Taliban warlords, some of whom were intricately involved in the drug trade or about to get involved in the drug trade. You know, these guys were seen as being too important not to link up with, no matter how brutal or corrupted they had been and were going to be. And we'll see that's a constant theme throughout the next 20 years. From Matt Akins in a 2014 Rolling Stone article, quote,

Hamid Karzai, who had been plucked from obscurity to serve as president, was busy cementing with U.S. acquiescence a political order deeply linked to the opium trade. In the north, he wooed the Northern Alliance commanders as partners. In his southern homeland, he appointed Chair Mohammed Akunzada as governor of Helmand, the nephew of the now-deceased Mullah Nassim, the same guy who had first introduced large-scale poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Remember, we talked about him in the last episode.

Karzai, of course, stays president for the next 13 years, and there's heroin traffickers and drug lords rising up in political positions, including his half-brother, who was alleged to have been a top player in the drug trade, one of the most, if not the most powerful man in the South, before he was assassinated in 2011.

The opium cultivation, it starts going again. It hits the ground running. By 2003, according to the LA Times, President Karzai, he proclaims a jihad or holy war against opium production. But members of his government, they're continuing to reap enormous profits from their roles in the trade. And the Taliban, within a year or two of that, they're starting to use opium to help sustain their fight against these guys, against the coalition and government forces. If Karzai drops the jihad and no one cares, does it make a sound?

Clearly, it does not. So those early days of the war, right, the early 2000s, the US wasn't super focused on the opium issue. It wasn't seen as a main problem that needed to be tackled. They were there to take on the terrorists, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, all that. Like I said, it was the Brits who first got involved. Yeah, I mean, there were loads of

News shows at this time with like correspondents standing in front of piles of burnt opium, giggling and pissing their pants about the fact that the Brits were dismantling the opium crops in Helmand. It's pretty funny. Actually, there's loads of stuff on YouTube. Anyway, you can watch that. If they were standing close to the burning crops, they might have been giggling for like different reasons, you know?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there is a clip. Oh, I'm just thinking of it now, of a reporter. I don't know whether it's burning weed or cocoa or... I know the guy. He just gets super, super high. It is hilarious. But yeah, spring of 2002, the Brits, they start offering to pay Afghan farmers off to destroy their opium crops.

But these Afghan farmers, you know, they're not dummies. They would harvest their crops, then show the Brits the fields being destroyed after the harvest and double cash in or just show them part of the field destroyed and get money that way as a 2019 article by Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post details. All right. Now I'm on the side of the Afghan farmers for sure. That's cool. Yeah. Surprise. You're on the side of the people growing and trading drugs. Yeah.

Shocker. The basic thing with the American forces was confusion, right? They didn't know what to do or what department was handling what, which military forces should do what, and what would actually work. I've seen the early days of the policy towards opium cultivation described as laissez-faire, as in like kind of, you know, making it up as they went along, not sure. Each kind of guy on the ground is kind of left up to them. Eventually, people started to get clued in

This was going to be a problem. In a September 2005 diplomatic cable, then U.S. Ambassador Ronald Newman warned the White House and the State Department that, quote, narcotics could be the factor that causes corruption to consume Afghanistan's fledging democracy.

You know, nobody knew what to do, but people were starting to get worried. Like, do you spray? Do you rip them up? Do you arrest people? Even if it's going to piss off the locals, like it's a tough call because you could end up fucking up the poor farmers, pissing off that population who you need on your side. So like, like, what do you think is going to happen? What do you do? I mean, this is all a bit disingenuous, right? Like, how do we know now that all these US-backed warlords are shipping smack around the world and the State Department back then didn't?

Well, it's not disingenuous, right? It was a calculation. I don't know how up what their level of awareness was because, again, things were just starting to get going then. I think they knew some of these guys had done that before. But also, again, it wasn't seen as a...

necessary calculation at that moment because the focus was on it. Again, it's different priorities, right? The CIA is not going to be concerned with drug trafficking. That's the DA that's concerned with that thing, right? Yeah. That's the DA that's concerned with that. So there was a lot of issues where the DA would go after someone in the CIA or the state department, but like, nah, you know, so that, that is an issue that's, that's happening there. And also there's a real calculation there. I mean, I've seen this mentioned again. I don't know how much merit it has that the U S was like, well,

there was a calculation by some of these high level guys that, that, well, the opium is going, not going to us, you know? So maybe it's not a major concern for us, which, you know, is kind of that, that realist perspective. That's, that's so calculating and yeah. Yeah. But,

You know, it's tough. Like, as I've said with opium before, the thing about major drug cultivation industries like this is it becomes at once like a destabilizing force because with it comes money and violence and corruption. But it's also stabilizing, especially in this case, because we're talking tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs where there are not that many, not that many opportunities there.

And, you know, when, if you go at them hard, again, you're going to piss off these people that you want on your side. You're going to push them to your enemies. But if you let it go, the corruption and just the nastiness of the drug trade keeps flowing. It's not as clear cut as it seems. And, and fell Bob Brown in 2020, she says, quote, although the illicit drug economy exacerbates insecurity, strengthens corruption, produces macroeconomic distortions and contributes to substance abuse disorder.

It also provides a vital lifeline for many Afghans and enhances their human security. Yeah, like if you're a journalist and the pandemic screws all your stories and you need to find another living and you start doing a pod and write all these scripts and bonus episodes and people still don't sign up to the Patreon. I mean, what are you going to do? Get into drugs, sex? Is that what you're saying? Is that the allegory?

I don't necessarily see an allegory there that where these two things make sense, but I'm glad that you brought it up. That's fine. Patreon.com, people. So the policy, as we're going to see, is ever-changing as they try to figure it out. 2000, 2003, it's kind of arbitrary, but you have the payments for farmers destroying their crops, and there's interdictions of crops, shipments, and all that.

Interdictions? Like, I guess, fancy way of saying like interceptions going after like smugglers and traffickers and things like that and storehouses and everything. 2004 is when it does kick up a notch. And the U.S. and international allies, they start getting aggressive. According to Whitlock in the Washington Post, Congress pressures the INL, which is the Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement Affairs, which is actually a huge agency most people haven't heard of.

You get pressure to get aggressive with cracking down. Actually, I didn't even know what the INL was until maybe five years ago when I was doing stories in El Salvador and kind of developed a source in it. I had to look them up because it kind of seems like the DEA does a lot of that work too. But yeah, they're very involved in international drug trafficking affairs and similar to the DEA, I guess. I mean, I don't know the specifics, man. Use Google.

Of course, that doesn't really work in no small part because some of the Afghan allies are heavily involved with the drug trade, including Karzai's half-brother, who's just moving up the ranks and is tied in with all these people. At one point, there's even talks of spraying the crops like Agent Orange style from the air, but President Karzai vetoes it. Said Ronald McMullin, who was the director of the INL's Afghanistan-Pakistan office from 2006-2007, quote,

Urging Karzai to mount an effective counter-narcotics campaign was like asking an American president to halt all U.S. economic activity west of the Mississippi. That was the magnitude of what we were asking the Afghans to do.

I mean, I kind of want to face off movie with Karzai and his half brother. Ben Kingsley, both roles. Guy Ritchie's a direct. I'm here. I'm here. I don't envy the position Karzai's in, right? Obviously, he's very corrupt, but it's kind of like, you know, is he stopping the aerial spraying?

out of that corruption because he realizes like when you start spraying stuff from the air in rural rural afghanistan like that is not gonna you know that's not gonna win over hearts and minds and the population is gonna fly that is yeah like i understand it to to a degree in 2008 the new york times magazine publishes a massive first person article from this guy thomas schweich

who had been involved with counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan, you know, a high-level official. He met Karzai in 2006, and he writes, quote, And, like...

He's right. You know, like, I got to be honest, I read the article and kind of feel like he's kind of a real stick in the mud, you know, not fun at parties, does get a little carried away. I mean, he's even saying there was a myth of a poor farmer growing this stuff, which is what allows European governments to avoid the messy anti-drug efforts and allow military officers to avoid it for the same reasoning. But again,

Corruption, 100% there. I don't really buy that. It really was poor farmers growing some of it. Yeah, maybe he's been honking on the pipe himself there. Dude, he died years ago. How dare you? Just disrespectful. Disrespectful. Speak ill of the dead. That's another t-shirt we can print.

Well, take this 2011 Nat Geo piece on the opium wars. You know, the writer interviews a farmer in Helmand who says, quote, we have two forms of money here, poppies and American dollars. This is our economy. The Taliban aren't pressuring me. That's just a story you see on TV. I grow for myself. I smuggle for myself. The Taliban are not the reason. Poverty is the reason. And they'll keep growing poppies here until they're forced not to. Who will stop the smugglers? The police? It's the police who transport our opium in their cars.

Oh, it's the American dream. I mean, he sounds like El Chapo, right? Well, I mean, it just, it's, you know, a couple of sentences that really summarize not just, not just the situation in Afghanistan, but the drug war in general across the world, you know? Absolutely. That's the most telling thing in this whole show so far. Like, it's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. Schweick continues in the article, quote, Karzai was playing us like a fiddle. The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement. The U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban. Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug trade. He could blame the West for his problems. And in 2009, he would be elected to a new term.

Okay. So I did a little sweating up on Karzai because I don't know. I've been out there. Like I've heard a lot of shitty things about him. According to us cable, the ambassador at the time, the U S ambassador, Carl, I can bury. So the Karzai is quote, inability to grasp the roast, the most rudimentary principles of state building and his deep seated insecurity as a leader combined to make any admission of fault unlikely in

in turn confounding our best efforts to find in Karzai a responsible partner. Now that as the partner of a diplomat guys is diplomats speak for a complete fucking idiot. Like it's insane. Like how did this guy even come to power? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. But like, it felt like he, they were like, Oh, why don't you run Luxembourg for a while? You know what I'm saying? Like,

I think, why didn't they just say that? Who gives a shit about Luxembourg? I think, I think he was going to have a tough time one way or another. You know, I think he, I'm not trying to rationalize a lot of the stuff that he did, but it wasn't like he wasn't handed an easy job, you know? No, no, no one's, no one's doubting that. It's, it's, it's a poison chalice. Yeah. But also the, the, the guy who's drinking from the chalice,

Oh, no, he definitely was corrupt as hell. And he was getting rich and his family was getting rich. Like there was no, there's no doubt about that. I mean, not just like, like a couple million dollars. I mean, we're talking like crypto money. You know, these guys were living, we're living large duffel bags full of hundred dollar bills. But again, there were some efforts made to combat the drug trade. They were going after the labs. They were going after large traffickers. The problem was no one really knew the lay of the land or could suss out who was telling the truth. Again,

fell Bob Brown, quote, immediately, however, the effort was manipulated by local Afghan strongman to eliminate drug competition, ethnic, tribal, and other political rivals.

Instead of targeting top echelons of the drug economy, many of whom had considerable political clout, interdiction operations were largely conducted against small, vulnerable traders who can neither sufficiently bribe nor adequately intimidate the interdiction teams and their supervisors within the Afghan government. I'm losing a lot of quotes here, like a lot of big words, a lot of multi-syllable words. Also, also two interdictions, and I've never even heard of the word interdiction before in my life. It's good work though. You know, these, I want to give the people proper credit. This is good work.

The U.S., you know, also by now, they had local Afghan units that were ripping up the crops manually. And this, again, is going to piss off the poor farmers. You know, they tried with these alternative means to work programs, but, you know, they never worked. And these farmers, remember, this was like the only economic opportunity in the South besides fighting. They're looking at the big guys getting away with it and they're pissed. And who steps in to fill that void? Who else but the Taliban gang?

Now, our boys in the Taliban, actually, mostly they're Sean's boys, had gotten routed by the U.S. forces and many of them crossed over the border into Pakistan to lick their wounds and wait things out, plot, you know, all that sort of good stuff.

Nice. Yeah, yeah. Cheap shot. I mean, whatever doesn't piss off the Albanians. So I'll go with them, Talibs, ISIS, whatever. So here, according to Brown, they start building themselves back up, you know, over a year or two without drug money, mostly from donations from Pakistan and the Middle East, and by taxing and trafficking other goods back and forth across the border. Illicit goods, you know. But the eradication effort, it really plays into their favor with their target audience, especially when it starts ratcheting up post-2004.

The rural population is losing their income. They're just getting driven further and further into the Taliban's hands. And it alienates the locals from the government, both federal, local, and with the local leaders allied with the U.S. who agree to the eradication efforts. It just pushes them further into their enemies' hands who realize they can step in, start supporting the farmers and locals who aren't politically connected enough to keep their opium cultivation going.

And they start being seen as the good guys by some. Again, Brown tells the story of the Taliban putting up posters saying they would protect farmers if the government tried to destroy their crops or shut down their opium operations. You know, it tells the farmers to reach out to them. So there's one where a group of farmers realizes they're in the midst of like a police operation one day when they suss out. There's like an undercover counter narcotics guy posing as a traitor.

The farmers contact the Taliban. Taliban tells them, kidnap this guy, hold them hostage, have him call the police in the area to come through, which he does. And the police come and the Taliban kill the police, fight them off. The villagers are saved from losing their opium and the Taliban guys are seen as heroes. Jesus Christ. I mean, on one hand, collective bargaining, seizing the means of production.

uh on the other mass murder yeah toughy yeah it's um it's uh it's it's it's a tough one man like what do you what do you what do you let the listeners make up their own yeah what are you gonna do so in the mid to late thousand to late 2000s again the taliban now starts moving back into the opium industry but mostly they're taxing growers and shipments

providing protection and making inroads with the population and just making that drug money. The DEA and the INL, they're actually making some arrests. They're going after some traffickers, both Taliban affiliated and not, targeting kingpins and doing some seizures. In fact, in 2009, the DEA gets funds from Congress to do the biggest international surge in its history with 80 agents deploying to Afghanistan. Or maybe it was Pakistan, but the area to focus on Afghanistan.

Like, can we take a step back to remind everyone that these are supposedly militant Islamists? Like at this point, they're just loading, unloading smack shipments, like half-baked Russians in a John Woo film. Yeah. I mean, it's,

But get money, you know, like I think a lot of the time. That's the old my ideology. Yeah. A lot of the times there are, you know, people who come off as the most pious or the most conviction ideology are going to make compromises that they would obviously, you know, excommunicate other people for because it serves their best interest. Oh, you're not talking about you're not talking about the Catholic Church, right? I'm talking about everyone. And there's a really good quote that you'll see coming up that I think breaks into like who was actually in charge of this.

But yeah, I mean, you know, don't fall for this, the nonsense of, oh, we're really strict in this and we're not going to do it. Everyone does it. You know, it doesn't matter what ideology they are. Also in 2009,

The Obama administration decides they're going to cool it with the eradication efforts. They're still doing military raids on Taliban-linked traffickers, but they shift these other efforts trying to get the farmers to try out alternative crops or change jobs. It's kind of like the—I mean, I don't know whether it was as bad as the trout farms in Kenyan deserts, but I wonder if there was a coding school that they were like, let's get these guys, let's teach these guys how to learn how to code, and then they won't have to traffic opium.

I mean, I literally wrote a story about a co-working space right by the old palace in Kabul when I was there. Wait, did you really? Actually, like, no joke. I actually wrote the first co-working space in Kabul was my story. Get out of here. Editors will take any old...

Well, truthfully though, like coding is a good idea. Like my advice to all your long journey. I have a friend who like just got out of the film industry. I do journalism. Like 38. Did like a coding bootcamp that cost a little bit of money. Now he's making more money than any journalist I know after like six. Anyway, moving on.

Oh, God. Jesus Christ. Don't do that. Patreon.com. Moving on. The efforts fail for all the alternative whatever job. I mean, there are some successes, right? But for the most part, they fail. In one instance, they pay farmers to renovate those irrigation canals to use for fruit trees and other crops. But instead, they just end up using them to irrigate poppies.

Wheat was also like a big crop, but, you know, they would just switch off between weed and opium depending on the money issue. I'm pretty sure you can grow opium like it's a fall winter crop, so you can grow it when you're not growing wheat. But, um. Yeah, I mean, every every tallard needs his fiber, right? Yeah. But yeah, fell Bob Brown again, quote, After decades of cultivation and the collapse of legal economic opportunities, opium is deeply entrenched in the socioeconomic fabric of Afghan society. Underlies much of the country's economic and power relations.

Many more actors than simply the Taliban participate in the opium economy, and these actors exist at all social levels. The crops, they do decline somewhat around 2009, a year before or after two, I think. But that has more to do with drought and other factors like overproduction in the years before. And the number of Afghans involved in the poppy industry actually declines from 2.4 million in 2007, 2008, to 1.6 million in 2008, 2009. But that number isn't going to stay down.

And now the Taliban are just getting further and further entrenched. Gretchen Peters in that 2016 paper details how the massive scale of Taliban drug operations has an oh shit moment during a battle in Marja in 2009 when they're trying to clear an opium market.

It takes days for NATO and Afghan troops to win. They kill 60 Taliban fighters, but they find 92 metric tons of hash, heroin, opium, and poppy seeds, and hundreds of gallons of the chemicals needed for refining. And at the time, it's the second largest drug haul in world history.

uh are we talking captagon for the biggest yeah i don't know i mean this is 2012 and captagon doesn't kick off till later but it's kind of like yeah these these you know it's like the prices and all that these these numbers get thrown around i think yeah you know you can safely surmise that 92 metric tons is like a fuckload of drugs but people you know journalists love to throw on take it from us that's a fuckload they love to throw on um what's it called what are these called um what's the word i'm drawing a blank here

Like a yearbook thing when it's like the most this, the most that. Ah, yeah, superlatives. Yes, they love to throw in superlatives to make a story. You know, it's how you convince your editor. Throw a superlative out there.

And now you see the Taliban, they're just getting more and more involved with the trades, with the traffickers. They're not just taxing. They're starting to do the trafficking as well. They're getting involved in the processing labs and the exporting, which up until then has been controlled by the trafficking networks. But a bunch of those major players get arrested by the U.S. and British forces. So, you know, it creates an opening in the market. Says Peters, quote,

Powerful Taliban commanders, including Mullah Naeem Baruch in Helmand, stepped into that gap. Baruch represented a new generation of Taliban commanders who were not simply collecting taxes on poppy crops and drug consignments, but actively meeting with district-level officials and tribal leaders to set opium production quotas, organizing military campaigns to attack government-led eradication programs, and coordinating exports of drug consignments.

Baric and others like him gain increasing wealth and autonomy, making the insurgency more fragmented, but also better funded and better armed.

Meanwhile, opium and heroin is just pouring out of the country, wreaking havoc far and wide. The BBC had a 2010 piece on how the growth of heroin in Afghanistan led to huge growth in Russian heroin addicts since the northern Tajikistan route was also growing. And on the way to Europe, smugglers and dealers found a willing market in Russia. In fact, Russia had long advocated tougher crackdowns on the poppy fields with the U.S.,

even doing joint exercises in 2010, making for some strange bedfellows. They did an op with the US and Afghan anti-drug forces and captured 2,000 pounds of high-grade heroin near Jalalabad. Wait, are the Afghans getting high on their own supply? Like, what are the stats there? Oh, yeah. I mean, for sure. It shot up there. I mean...

Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, just huge, huge growth in addicts. It's a tremendous problem, especially because where are you going to find treatment centers there? And I just mentioned Iran. Not only was the US allied with the Russians in the drug war, but with the Iranians too, who were working with the UN. I actually had no idea the Iranian provinces bordering southern Afghanistan were such just like lawless drug warrior, mad max situations. From a 2012 New York Times article, quote,

Nearly a decade ago, it was an active battlefield where more than 3,900 Iranian border police officers lost their lives fighting often better equipped Afghan and Pakistani drug gangs along nearly 600 miles of Iran's eastern border. Fucking 4,000. Like, that is nuts. In those days, smugglers with night vision equipment would roll over the border in all terrain vehicles with heavy weapons, actively engaging Iranian law enforcement forces wherever they found them.

Security forces were at times dying by the dozen each day. I mean, that is wild, like insane. If I knew about it back then, I can tell you I'll be pitching a doc, that's for sure.

So if this is like in Balochistan, let's talk about doing a film together there. Cause like, Oh my God, I've been trying to get out there for years. Like do producers listen to this show? I mean, apart from the guys who steal our shit advice. Yeah. Uh, besides people taking our ideas and then doing them with actual resources. I don't know. But if you're out there, you know, do with us like, you know, 90 grand, we'll make it happen in 2012. Yeah.

Again, Iran is seizing the highest amounts of opiates and heroin worldwide, which is crazy. Iranians were netting eight times more opium and three times more heroin than all other countries in the world combined. But the article details the Iranians did make a lot of progress in cracking down, but, you know, not really with the most progressive methods. Said the article, quote, read drug traffickers. Hundreds have been executed in recent years, making Iran the second leading country in the world in death sentences after China.

Yeah. I mean, no one even knows how many people China kills, right? It's probably killing more than everyone else combined. I mean, that's not, that's not even a joke. That's just a grim fact. Like,

I'm sure that I'm going to do more jokes further down. Danny's going to love. We're going to have to, once we try to make these, these Chinese deals, we're going to have to just edit that out like Disney and NBA style, you know, just complete fealty. I'll do that. I'm fine. I'll sell. I fucking do anything for that Chinese. Just do a random episode about how, how Z is just like a great guy.

Just like no theme whatsoever. You know who doesn't need drugs? Z. That dude, nice guy, great leader. So yeah, despite best efforts, well, I mean efforts, the Taliban are capitalizing on heroin. The government allies and officials are capitalizing on heroin. And it's all just flowing out into Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan and further out into the world. It just, it can't be stopped.

And in the Akins 2014 Rolling Stone article, he says it represents 15% of the overall economy in Afghanistan. And here he is on Helmand province during the harvest season. Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history. With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90% of the world's supply.

The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. Moving on, by 2016, the Taliban are pretty much fully enmeshed in the trade, no longer just taxing or providing protection. I mean, they're a cartel. They're working on every stage of the chain. I mean, like, look at the shadow commander we just opened the episode with.

And, you know, they've been profiting from the opening trade for years, decades for taxing everything else. But having them really move into every stage of the business, that's new, right? They are basically rivaling the other major cartels in the region. And like they're, you know, it's kind of like Fark in a way, like they're a drug gang now.

Quote from The Times, the new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansar, again, this is 2016, is at the pinnacle of a pyramid of tribal Ishaqzai drug traffickers and has amassed an immense personal fortune, according to United Nations monitors. That drug money changed the entire shape of the Taliban. With it, Mullah Mansar bought off influential dissenters when he claimed the supreme leadership over the summer, according to senior Taliban commanders.

You know, like all good drug lords with a plan, they want to control as much of the chain as possible because that's how you maximize profits. Why tax when you can smuggle? Why smuggle when you can produce? Why produce when you can refine? On and on and on. Oh man, this is such a head screw. Like,

Everyone on the take. I mean, like, listen to you say this actually back. It just makes you realize that the old maxim, follow the money, is just, is the truest thing in the world. Like, it's not about morals. It's not about religion. It's not about anything else. It's about making cash. Like, I don't know.

maybe i'm getting too cynical yeah i mean i think i think it's it's hard to uh to see to listen to this story and see what's going on there and not kind of get a bit cynical on the hopelessness of it all but uh you know who knows look at the the golden well i guess now i was gonna say look at burma they shut down their heroin and they're doing look at burma they did so well instead they're just making tens of billions of dollars on on heroin i'm not heroin on crystal meth with an extremely oppressive regime so maybe there's no hope who knows anyway

Many of these networks, the ones who really work the Taliban, these heroin gangs, they had their headquarters just over the border in Pakistan. And that's off limits to NATO and U.S. troops. So a lot of the smuggling networks, they're run by these close-knit families and tribes who, you know, they just can't be touched because of where they're located. As for some of the major players, this is from the 2009 Gretchen Peters article from the ISIP article.

Quote, when most visualize the war in Afghanistan, they think of pitched battles and rugged mounted hamlets and IED attacks along remote dirt roads.

It is important to also keep in mind the powerful traders, smugglers, and money launderers pulling the strings from the offices in Quetta, Karachi, and Dubai. The ambition of these businessmen is neither to spread Wahhabi Islam nor to create a Muslim caliphate. It is not even to eject U.S. troops from the Saudi Peninsula. The goal is to make money, lots of it. The U.N. ODC and some counter-narcotics officials estimate that fewer than two dozen people control the vast majority of the Afghan opium market and profit most from it.

So, yeah, I mean, that's the quote I was talking about earlier, that your cynicism, too, that just kind of breaks it all down. Yeah, I was going to say.

Yeah. Also, I mean, kudos to you. You've gone from Alexander the Great to Obama in the Afghan war in, I reckon, like an hour and 20 minutes. That's pretty impressive. We're making good time. And yeah, I know a lot of this sounds convoluted, and that's because it really is. Like, I swear it's not my fault in writing this all up. There's just a lot. There's a lot going on. Take the story...

of Haji Juma Khan, who is one of the most prolific smugglers ever called in Afghanistan, called the Escobar of heroin, which, you know, I kind of feel like I read about three other guys called the Escobar of heroin every, every other month, but still he's from a tribe that has lived in that tri-border area of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran for centuries. Some of the like harshest, most forbidding areas, landscapes ever. The tribe is Brachui, Brachui, I'm definitely mispronouncing it, but you know, we'll live. And everyone involved with him is from his tribe.

He got big the first go around when the Taliban is in charge in the 90s. You know, he's sending 100 car convoys through the Iranian desert, then through the Arabian Sea on ships, landing on deserted beaches next to the United Arab emigrants where they buried their cargo in the sand to be picked up later, which I mean, that just sounds kind of fucking cool. You know, it's old school pirate stuff. Yeah. He's also maybe a high ranking Taliban guy. Maybe not. But the U.S. picks him up in 2001 in Kandahar, not realizing how big a fish they got. Allegedly.

He also trafficked weapons, allegedly helped provide funding to, you know, some al-Qaeda operatives and the Taliban, had the mobile heroin labs going, you know, and the stuff he moved on the cargo ships from Karachi to the UAE. On the way back, he would bring weapons, unload them in Karachi, and just take them over land to the Taliban.

Taliban troops help protect his drug shipments as they snake down into the southern Afghanistan areas. But Afghan security officials say, you know, it was increasingly increasingly a blurring of line between whether they were insurgents or his personal sort of army and and ruling sort of area.

Now, he ends up getting let go in 2001, and some reports say he was let go because the U.S. didn't know who he was. But others say he agreed to be a paid informant for the CIA and was snitching on his Taliban and AQ collaborators. It's also alleged he wanted a role in the new government and was willing to give up the goods for amnesty. He even made a secret trip to the U.S. in 2006 to talk to the CIA and DA and give them info, allegedly.

His network, as of 2007, included a force of 1,500 armed fighters. And the question is, like, was he Taliban? Was he funding them? Was he working with them? Was he using them as bodyguards? Was he just, you know, providing all the same? Like, who knows? I mean, what is the Taliban at this point? And again, the U.S. gets him again in 2008 after arranging what he thought was another clandestine meeting in Jakarta. They actually, you know, get him there. They bring him to the U.S. for trial. Yeah.

He was apparently also working with Karzai's half-brother, like they were kind of two peas in a pod. I don't know why I'm using that phrase, two peas in a pod. Whatever, man. Paying off border agents, paying off intel in Pakistan and Iran, and on the payroll of the CIA this whole time giving up this info.

His nephew takes over his role after he gets arrested. He gets arrested, the nephew, in 2009 and turned over to Afghanistan, the government there, who let him go after 72 hours. Meanwhile, he stays locked up for 10 years and then is quietly released in 2018. So it's just like, I mean, that guy's a perfect summation. Like, what the hell is going on? Who's allied with who? Who's what? Who's this? Who's doing whatever? It's just discombobulating, I think would be the word I would use.

Like the amount of random people the Americans picked up and chucked and get my time as well. And it's worth like remembering that despite all of this stuff, I was that way here. He is still alive and kicking somewhere. $25 million reward on his head guys. Maybe, you know, someone that's a fan of this show could pick him up. That could, that could make us a few quid on the Patreon.

God, yeah, that'd be nice. But anyway, we're going to move to 2017. Trump's in charge. And in terms of just like stupid gestures in the war on drugs in Afghanistan or in general, he's about to launch one of the dumbest. The US decides to start targeting drug labs in Afghanistan and the networks with airstrikes. It's estimated there were 500 labs in the country. But the labs, I mean, they're mostly just a couple of huts with stoves and barrels and precursor chemicals. Don't get me wrong. Like you need serious chemists to do this stuff.

But these are cheaply made things that can easily be rebelled. And the U.S. is sending like, I saw this mentioned, I'm not sure if it's 100%, but B-52s and F-35s to bomb these things, which is, you know, cost benefit analysis. I don't know. It starts in November 2016, but by early 2019, they've kind of realized how foolish these things are and how much of a waste of money it is. And they've given up.

So what was that Moab bomb thing targeting? Like, I remember that in the news. I don't really know what that was supposed to be hitting. I don't know. I think it was like a mountain fortress. I don't think it was this, you know, and, and interestingly, 2017 is,

is also when Afghanistan hits the all-time high for opium production, an estimated 9,900 tons. The UNODC estimates it was worth $1.4 billion in sales by farmers for 7% of the GDP. But again, when it comes to the money and the stats, it's always hard to suss out what's real and what's not. The UN has estimated the Taliban earned $400 million from heroin sales in 2018-2019. And a May 2021 U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan report, quote,

Quoted a U.S. official as estimating they make 60% of their revenue from opium. Others have said it's only earning $40 million a year and it's mostly from just taxes levied.

I've seen experts who really focus on the market in general put it at between $20 million, $40 million. It's really a hard thing to pin down. Yeah, it's like that seems like big and tiny at the same time. I mean, like the official GDP of Afghanistan is like $20 billion, so it isn't that much, but I guess...

I don't know. Like it just so hard to gauge these kinds of black markets. Like what value are you putting on the drug? Are you putting what it's sold for in Afghanistan or what it goes for on the street? Yeah, exactly. Like the end user. What a gram goes for on the street, you're inflating the price like upwards of a ton. I mean, what, what does it, what does it go for? Anyway, moving on first, I feel like I've been saying that a lot this episode for, for some more insight into who the traffickers in Afghanistan are. UND, ODC, despite their, their, you know,

potentially inflated numbers, they put out a huge paper in 2020 where they interviewed 41 traffickers of varying levels from small timers who just went from province to province inside the country to big time international players. And it's a pretty monumental paper. And they found that most of the drug trafficking organizations or DTOs are linked by either family, tribe, or like locality kind of neighborhoods.

Also, interestingly, it seems like a lot of the traffickers collaborated with each other. Quote, many DTOs in Afghanistan worked within broader alliances, loosely coordinating and cooperating with a wider network of similar organizations in the supply chain. Interview traffickers were able to source opiates, precursor chemicals, and access to clandestine laboratories from other DTOs across Afghanistan. In some cases, it was a specific head of the wider network who coordinated the activities of several DTOs.

Kind of seems like they get along a little better than your average Mexican and Colombian cartel, though. They also broke it down to where it's like small-scale traders, they buy from farmers, they sell to the medium traders who probably buy from a bunch of different small-scale traders, and they in turn move it to bigger traffickers. Quote, in 2007, a UNODC survey estimated that the total number of mid- and high-level traffickers in Afghanistan was between 800 and 900, but was unable to determine the number of small-scale traffickers in the country.

And all these big networks, they're made up of hundreds of mid-level and thousands of small-time traffickers who might just hop on a motorbike, you know? Some nice price breakdowns as well. From Kabul to Canada, the transportation cost of one kilogram of heroin was reported as being $7,000 to $10,000 US dollars, while to an unspecified country in Europe, the cost was between $4,000 to $6,000. One of the interviewees who was a courier reported that he was paid $2 per gram to smuggle heroin to India, which is...

The equivalent to $2,000 per kilogram. So you kind of see how that plays out and what the money issues are. Yeah, I mean, how is all this controlled by a dozen guys? It seems so irregular. Like it's such a vast thing to get your head around as like a business, I guess. The market finds a way, baby. You know, the market always finds a way. Yeah.

Yeah, all right, cool. Supply chain, you know? Yeah, all right, Michelle Bachman. Yeah, I don't know what supply chain means, but I do see it mentioned a lot these days when it comes to shipping stuff. I do know what it means. But yeah, I'm going to yada, yada, yada a lot of what's going on because we want to go to 2021 when the Taliban are back in charge. They've pledged to ban opium, which they... I mean, I don't like to offer predictions, but they probably won't. The LA Times quotes Felba Brown again saying,

It will be enormously difficult to achieve a poppy-free, drug-free Afghanistan. Even assuming that the country remains stable and doesn't disintegrate into civil war, and assuming it has meaningful international support, it will still take decades to wean Afghanistan off of poppy.

I mean, I feel like Josh Brolin at the end of Sicario, right? It's like supply and demand. Like no matter what you do, you're going to sell the puppy if people are taking heroin. It's tough. I mean, there were papers, I think in late 2000 or early 2010s about, you know, we talked about it last episode, but maybe getting Afghanistan involved in the legal opium market as a way of just like...

countering the trade, although I'm sure black market stuff still makes more money, but providing a living to the farmers and sort of countering that in some way. There was loads of interesting stuff about the turn of the 20th century where

Like opium was obviously a huge deal. And the Brits who were the biggest importers of opium, they made, I think Turkey and India and a couple of other countries, like the only suppliers. Well, yeah, there were, there were white market stuff, right? There were reasons for that though. You know, they already had a market. Afghanistan didn't really have a market then. Um, you know, they were, Turkey also did a really good effort in transitioning, um,

It wasn't like they were told to do. They got on the up and up, the transition. They still have a market. I think in Spain and other parts of Europe, there's legal opium. There's a really interesting story, I think, about Tasmania and the legal opium market there that's kicked up in the past 20 years that involves some shadiness. It's interesting because you need a ton of that for all the morphine and all that that's going out there into the world for painkillers. Yeah.

But yeah, I want to add one more just underworld special into the mix, which Sean, I mean, it's your favorite right now. There's a lot of talk of Afghanistan getting into the meth game.

Oh, yeah. Everyone loves meth. And if we don't get on our t-shirt, we failed at this pod game. That's not a bad t-shirt idea. We have the merch up on underworldpod.com. We have the don't Instagram your crimes, which is doing well. But I don't know where you could wear an everyone loves meth shirt. But I'm sure... I know a few folks in Oklahoma that would definitely wear that. I'm sure our fan base will find a way. So...

Ephedra, which is a plant that's used to make meth, it grows wild in Afghanistan. And apparently the business is starting to boom. Traffickers are already sending like free starter packs to Australia, according to a recent foreign policy article, which says, quote, a recent European Union funded study found that Afghanistan has become a significant producer and supplier of relatively large quantities of low cost ephedrine and methamphetamine that could outrival or rival output of opiates.

The report found that one district alone, Bakwa, in the northwestern province of Fara, with a population of 80,000, was potentially earning $240 million a year by processing ephedra plants. There's your documentary. I mean, that number two just sounds insane. Like, no one, no small district, I don't know, I don't want to... Well, like, how can the whole...

industry be making like peanuts when that's making 240 million a year? Yeah. I mean, I'm just skeptical. I don't want to throw shade on these reports. I haven't read the full ones and the research they've done, but it just, it seems inflated. But yeah, those numbers sound insane. But yeah, that is a, that is the conclusion of our two part podcast.

Afghanistan, Taliban, heroin, fun, little series that, uh, that I threw together relatively quickly. And, uh, I want to thank to, you know, our, our big sponsors here, train ants, we'll winter cross, Chris Cusimano, Doug Prindiville, Jared Levy, Jeremy rich, Matthew Cutler, Ross Clark. You know,

you know, for the donations they made who without that, I probably would have given up doing this already. So thank you guys. And everyone else that contributes to the patron. It actually really does mean a lot. This is, yeah, it does mean a lot. It's a lot of work. Patreon.com podcast. And I hate, it is extremely demeaning to keep begging for this, but we'll keep doing it until we're making that Honda Accord money. You can do it. You can do it this week and I'll do it next week. Yeah. Yeah. We'll trade off. So, so I don't, anyway, thank you guys again.

See you all 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. We recently finished up season 3 where we covered cases of parricide, which is the act of someone killing their parents.

Tune in now as we start Season 4, where we dive into the minds of family annihilators, sick individuals who decided to destroy their entire families. Check us out anywhere that you listen to podcasts or on YouTube by searching this is monsters.