Afghanistan was the world largest producer of opiates. While throughout the war against illicit crops communists had continued to develop in areas controlled by Moujaidines. When soviets were prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan the Afghan resistance was linked to opium production and trafficking of heroin. They requested to the representatives of the interim government installed in Peshawar if it could be reduced poppy cultivation in the territories under their control. At the time of the intervention of troops in Afghanistan, Tony Blair did not hesitate to blame only the Taliban for the highlights given to Afghanistan about the production of opiates. The international press came to the conclusion that the drug played a role in the financing of terrorist networks of Osama Bin Laden. The reality is certainly much more complex.
While the war was responsible for a considerable growth in production between 1979 and 1992, became only partially true since 1991 (the fall of communism), after the American and the Russian stop arming and equipping their protectionist groups. The Taliban did nothing to inherit the situation of 1994 1996 and then manage to take care of its benefits. The reasons why the Molah Omar banned (successfully) the planting of opium poppy in 2000 is subject to speculation about its conduct later.
Comparatively, the reasons for the resurgence of large scale production in 2002 and 2003 are clear: poverty of the peasants who have no access to international aid, the inability of the central government imposed by the United States to control the country, and the use by the United States of warlords engaged in the traffic to fight Taliban hotbeds. Afghanistan is a flagship theater in the geopolitics of drugs, where all issues are present in other fields.
The Taliban have not only just, like its predecessors, the freedom fighters , inherited the fruits of war that undermined the country since 1979. Until then, the poppy cultivation and opium use, known for over 700 years in Afghanistan, it did not imply major problems for residents and their neighbors. Alexander the Great who was crossing the region (327 325 B.C.) at the head of their armies, made opium known to the people of the region. However, the poppy culture did not begin in the Indian subcontinent until many years later. At the end of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo noted poppy plantations in northern Afghanistan province of Badakhshan, province that remains today a significant area of illicit crops. While opium is consumed boiling the fibers of the capsule, the Mongol conquerors are those who teach local people to pierce the capsule to collect the rubber and eat it. The Mongols who reigned in India between 1527 and 1707 were the poppy cultivation and opium trade a state monopoly. But the habit of smoking opium, invented by the Portuguese, but not disclosed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the monopoly of the drug passes into British hands. India and Pakistan inherited this monopoly at the time of its independence.
During the 1920 y 1930, representatives of the Afghani government, a sovereign country, and took part in meetings of the Permanent Central Opium of the League of Nations. During the second opium conference in 1924 declared the representatives of Afghanistan where opium poppy was cultivated in the provinces of Herat, Badarkhshan and Djelalabad and that the State had waived its monopoly on the opium trade. The Afghan customs offices levied a duty of 5 on production of opium, and by then privatized . In 1932, he cultivated 40 hectares of poppy producing 75 tons of opium (for the estimated 6000 tons in China for the same period). The poppy was banned twice, in 1945 and 1957, did not prevent the continuation of clandestine exports to India. Afghanistan, recognizing its lack of means to address this serious problem calls, in vain it seems, the assistance of the international community to eradicate their crops.
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