New Delhi, Oct 28 — In a switch from the past, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is expressing concerns over the increasing cultivation of narcotics in “neighboring countries”, according to media reports from Kabul.
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Pakistan became the principal conduit for the United States and Saudi support to the Mujahideen fighters through the CIA's covert program known as ‘Operation Cyclone’, as recorded in several accounts.
While the primary objective was to fight Soviet forces, many academic and journalistic studies argue that the war also coincided with a dramatic expansion of opium cultivation and heroin trafficking in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
While some Mujahideen groups allegedly continued the trade to fund their war against rivals after the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989, the Taliban had come down heavily later, sharing images of setting fire to fields growing opium and cannabis plants and their processing plants.
Now, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has reiterated the regime’s worries over increasing cultivation of narcotics in neighboring countries while addressing a conference titled ‘The Islamic Emirate’s Fight Against Narcotics’, reported Tolo News on Tuesday.
The conference, held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was attended by representatives of regional countries and international organisations, added the report.
Muttaqi emphasised the need for joint regional efforts to combat drug cultivation, production, and trafficking. He said his country is ready to facilitate field visits by representatives of regional countries and international organisations to assess Afghanistan's anti-narcotics efforts firsthand.
Earlier this year, British researcher David Mansfield said in a research article that the ban on narcotics in Afghanistan has shifted the production industry of these substances to Pakistan and parts of Iran. In his report, he emphasised that the production of industrial drugs such as methamphetamine and ephedrine inside Afghanistan has decreased, while it is expanding in border areas of Pakistan and Iran, media reports said.
Mansfield added that the Taliban continue to suppress methamphetamine production in Afghanistan, an action that has increased transaction costs and reduced the income of actors involved in this supply chain.
Following such reports of increased drug production in areas adjoining its borders, spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior Abdul Matin Qani told Tolo News that the United Nations and the international community should investigate the issue and take measures to prevent the cultivation, production, and trafficking of narcotics from Iran and Pakistan into Afghanistan and other countries in the region.
Incidentally, Alfred W. McCoy, one of the most frequently cited researchers on the issue, argued that CIA-backed covert operations and Pakistan’s security apparatus created conditions that facilitated the narcotics trade.
McCoy, who has documented drugs and their trade for about 50 years, wrote about the influence of illicit drugs on US foreign policy being evident between 1979 and 2019 “in the abysmal failure of its never-ending wars in Afghanistan”.
Reports quote McCoy's research describing how narcotics networks developed alongside the anti-Soviet war effort. He is said to have written that hundreds of heroin refineries operated in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province under the protection of powerful political and security figures, while weapons intended for the Mujahideen moved through the same logistical environment that enabled heroin trafficking.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) similarly observes that Afghanistan's emergence as a major opium producer was closely linked to the period of war that began in 1979.
Now, “The De facto Authorities of Afghanistan reported that over 4,000 hectares of opium poppy were eradicated in 2025, although UNODC could not technically verify this number,” noted UNODC’s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2025.
It added, citing data that eradication of opium poppy “in two countries near Afghanistan” increased from 5,868 hectares in 2022 to 13,200 in 2023. The report attributed this to a possible “balloon effect”, where enforcement in one country leads to the displacement of illegal activities to another.
“More information and close monitoring of the situation are needed to fully understand the extent to which cultivation may have shifted to countries in the region and far beyond Afghanistan,” it added.