Opium, meth and the future of international drug control in Taliban Afghanistan
November 2022
Book Chapter
Dr John Collins, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
Shehryar Fazli, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
Ian Tennant, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
SOC ACE Project: Evaluating Afghanistan’s past, present and future engagement with multilateral drug control
Morning in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photography: Mohammad Rahmani.
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
With the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban swept back to power with almost shocking speed and coherence. This was despite two decades of intervention and state-building efforts by NATO powers, which had sought to forestall precisely this outcome. This failure of a direct intervention strategy raised immediate questions over the future shape of Afghanistan’s drug policies and how it would engage with multilateral forums such as the United Nations. The UN drug control system will have to contend with whether and how Afghanistan and UN member states can find a way to cooperate over the country’s drug policies, through anti-organised crime treaty and other frameworks. The Taliban’s April 2022 announcement of the reintroduction of an opium production ban has revived one of the key questions around its similar policy in the early 2000s: is this a sustainable and sincere move, or an opportunistic or impossible intervention?
Published in: Michael Cox (ed.). Afghanistan: Long war, forgotten peace. London: LSE Press, 2022. The full book is available to download here.
