By Azam Ahmed
An oasis stretched far into the desert, a vast sea of emerald stalks and scarlet poppy flowers that grew to the horizon.
The Taliban operated openly, running a social experiment unlike anything in the country. Tens — then hundreds — of thousands of people flocked here to escape the war and grow poppy, fleeing the American efforts to wipe out the crop.
The Taliban opened a trauma hospital to treat their wounded and earned a fortune, not just from opium, but also from methamphetamine and taxes on goods moving in and out of Afghanistan, bringing them millions upon millions of dollars every month.
During the war, this remote district became a laboratory for a future Taliban state, providing money for the war and a sanctuary for the men fighting it.
All that has changed. The Taliban boom town is rapidly going bust.
The same insurgents who embraced opium to help finance their war have put an end to it, ordering a ban that has all but cleared Afghanistan of poppy and other illicit drugs.
What the United States and its allies failed to do in two decades of war, the Taliban has managed in two years of peace. In an area where poppy once dominated the landscape, barely a stalk remains.
Hundreds of labs set up to process heroin and methamphetamine have been closed or destroyed. The drug bazaar that powered this part of southern Afghanistan has been all but emptied. And the nation, already reeling without international aid, has lost a sizable piece of its economy as a result.
On top of that, the Taliban government has stiffened its taxes, leaving residents bitter and angry. Many have moved away, except those too poor or invested to leave, like Abdul Khaliq.
“This is all coming to an end,” he said, waving his hand toward the emptying villages.
There was almost nothing in this district, Bakwa, when he arrived 25 years ago, just an empty desert plain. He built an empire out of sand, selling the pumps and solar panels that provided water for the opium boom, helping turn Bakwa into a frontier outpost for smugglers, traders and farmers.
Now his story, like Bakwa’s, has come full circle: the foreigners gone, the Taliban back in power, the earth stripped of poppy and the land returning to dust.
“It’s a matter of time,” he said.
The war in Afghanistan was many things: a mission to eliminate al-Qaida and oust the group that gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden; an ambitious drive to build a new Afghanistan, where Western ideals ran headlong into local traditions; a seemingly endless entanglement, where winning sometimes mattered less than not losing.
It was also a drug war.
The Americans and their allies tried again and again to sever the Taliban’s income and stop one of the world’s worst scourges: opium and heroin production.
The United States spent nearly $9 billion on heavy-handed eradication and interdiction, yet Afghanistan eclipsed its own records as the largest producer of illicit poppy in the world.
What did change was where that poppy was grown. Little by little, farmers flooded once empty deserts in southwestern Afghanistan, barren pockets of sand with almost no populations to speak of before.
At its height, the Taliban oversaw a narco-state here, a farm-to-table drug operation with hundreds of field labs processing opium into heroin and wild ephedra into methamphetamine for Europe, Asia and elsewhere. By the end of the war, Bakwa had become an entrepôt of the drug trade, home to the largest open-air drug market in the country.
The Taliban showed flexibility, too, both morally and financially. Despite banning poppy on religious grounds before the American invasion, the Taliban allowed farmers to grow as much of it as they wanted during the war.
And they taxed it loosely, often whatever farmers could afford, adopting a hearts-and-minds strategy. They also taxed smugglers, who were happy to help fund a Taliban war machine that didn’t interfere with business.
Bakwa soon became an incubator for governance. Taliban courts adjudicated all manner of disputes, while millions of dollars flowed monthly to help finance the Taliban mission beyond Bakwa and the southwest.
Western officials took aim at that money. They began with eradication, then tried persuading farmers to grow legal crops, and ended with fighter jets bombing makeshift labs made of mud.
“At least $200 million of this opium industry goes into the Taliban’s bank accounts,” Gen. John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2017, a year of peak poppy production, said at the time. “And this fuels — really pays for the insurgency.”
But the Taliban’s customs checkpoints were just as essential in Bakwa, or even more so, taxing goods to the tune of $10 million a month or more, according to Taliban officials.
“The money from agriculture, poppy included, funded the war” in these regions, said Haji Maulavi Asif, now the Taliban’s governor for Bakwa district. “But the money from the customs operation helped fund the entire movement.”
Now that poppy has been banned, the farmers the Taliban once relied on feel betrayed, while the Taliban is trying to govern without the money it brings.
“While economically, the decision to ban poppy costs a lot, politically it makes sense,” said Asif. “We are silencing the countries of the world who say we are growing poppy and participating in the global drug trade.”
The Americans withdrew for good in 2021 and the Taliban took over. Months later, the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, declared that poppy cultivation was “absolutely prohibited in the whole country.”
The Taliban claimed to have arrested numerous traffickers, seized nearly 2,000 tons of drugs and raided hundreds of heroin labs. In 2023, the Taliban destroyed dozens of labs in Bakwa, setting them ablaze.
Where the Americans had cherry-picked from the sky, killing or injuring innocents along the way, the Taliban removed nearly every laboratory in Bakwa.
Farmers blame the Taliban for their misery. For nearly 15 years, their poppy — and the taxes the Taliban collected from it — supported the insurgents’ war to establish a government.
Now that the Taliban got what they wanted, they have forgotten the people of Bakwa who made it all possible, residents grumble. Farmers too poor to leave now send their sons to work on harvests elsewhere, renting them out as labor.
Like others, Khaliq holds the Taliban responsible.
Like others, he knows some people are still hoarding opium reserves to sell at a high price, given the ban. Prices have more than quintupled since 2021, and some are still getting rich.
But everything he owns has lost value: his land and equipment, and hundreds of solar panels that sit in tidy rows, waiting for farmers who will never come back. The barren furrows of earth swirl like fingerprints over a monochromatic desert, a reminder of what was.
“This is life,” he says. “Everything ends. I will be done one day, too. But even if this ends, somewhere else will be beginning.”
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