of opium (Rubin, 2000: 1796) Opium was nevertheless a vital
source of income for the Taliban. The involvement of the Taliban
in the drug trade was plain almost from the outset of their rule. In
a 1996 interview, Mullah Omar admitted that the Taliban received
revenue from a tax on opium (Maley, 2000a: 17), and by 1999, 97
per cent of Afghanistan’s opium crop was from Taliban-controlled
areas, (Rubin, 2000: 1795). Eyewitness testimony pointed to
Taliban involvement not only in compelling farmers to grow
opium, but in distributing fertilizer for the crops (Meier, 1997: 4),
and the USA concluded that there was ‘evidence that the Taliban,
which control much of Afghanistan, have made a policy decision
to take advantage of narcotics trafficking and production in order
to put pressure on the west and other consuming nations’ (US
Department of State, 1998). In 1999, according to a UN report,
‘the production of opium increased dramatically to 4600 tonnes,
almost twice the average production of the previous four years’
(United Nations, 2001a: 35). However, on 27 February 2000,
doubtless with an eye to their international standing, the Taliban
ordered a total ban on cultivation of the poppy; the output for 2000
fell to 3276 tonnes, and for 2001 to just 185 tonnes (United
Nations, 2001d: para. 79). The ban was resented by farmers, for
whom no alternative income sources were provided, and won the
Taliban surprisingly little kudos, in part because of the suspicion
that the ban was driven by the desire not to add to what was
already a large stockpile, and that output falls owed much to the
drought by which Afghanistan had been gripped, the worst since
1971.
THE TALIBAN AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The Taliban’s human rights record attracted relatively little atten-
tion after they took over Kandahar and Herat. The killing of
Najibullah changed all that. The unusual spectacle of a former
President gruesomely murdered was sufficient to attract
correspondents from around the world, and once they had filed
236 The Afghanistan Wars