‘between the dragon and his wrath’, 1994–2017officials, commanders and tribal leaders have a vested interest in main-
taining the production since many of them benefit directly or indirectly
from this multimillion-dollar harvest.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc),
in 2001, the last year of the Taliban government, 8,000 hectares were under
opium production. A year later this had increased almost tenfold to 74,000
hectares and by 2007 the figure had more than doubled to 193,000 hectares.
By 2014 the area under opium cultivation had reached 224,000 hectares
with an estimated potential crop of 6,400 tons of raw opium, or 90 per cent
of the world’s illicit heroin. Farmers in the Helmand have recently obtained
faster-growing varieties of seed from China and are openly relishing the
prospect of three opium crops a year. The Taliban, too, benefit substan-
tially from the opium crop by taxing opium production and acting as
middlemen for drug barons. Drug addiction is now at epidemic propor-
tions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran with around 1.6 million Afghans,
6.7 million Pakistanis and 1.3 million Iranians addicted to heroin or other
opiates, yet Afghanistan and Pakistan have only a few drug treatment
centres and hardly any specialist medical staff to treat addicts. 36
The many failures of the 2001 American intervention are an indictment
of its counterinsurgency strategy and the regime change policy instituted by
the Bush administration. America and nato also pursued a similar policy
in their subsequent interventions in Iraq, Syria and, to an extent, in Libya.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Afghanistan after 2001 and subse-
quent interventions in the Middle East, it is that bombing and attempting
to oust unpleasant and unfriendly regimes from power, without giving seri-
ous thought to the composition of civil government, state building and the
strengthening of civil society, creates more problems than it solves. It is like
trying to contain the tidal wave after blowing up the reservoir, or driving a car
after disconnecting the steering wheel. ‘Regime change’ has failed the people
of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya inasmuch as it has not brought peace
or security to these countries and has provided little more than a veneer of
democratic institutions, with real government in the hands of unaccountable
militia leaders and Islamist factions. All this has led to is perpetual insecurity,
the rise of militant anti-Western Islamist movements, the undermining of
civil society, rampant corruption and mass displacement.
The failure of stabilization, civil and militaryThe 2001 intervention in Afghanistan significantly failed to bring political
stability or restore security. The civil war has not only continued but has