Afghanistan’s Opium Is Back

This year the Taliban’s interior ministry says it shut 301 drug laboratories, raided two factories making chemical tablets and arrested 10,065 people. It also says Afghanistan grows almost no opium. On October 29th the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that poppy covered some 43,300 hectares this year, up from about 10,200 in 2025, and that the harvest rose from 296 tonnes to 1,466. Opium earned traders an estimated $525m, roughly 2.7% of GDP and the most since 2018, bar the price spike of 2022.

The ministry’s spokesman, Mufti Abdul Mateen Qani, told Pajhwok that eradication had removed the crop before it ripened, leaving “almost zero”. His colleagues have struggled to agree on what was removed. On October 27th Abdul Rahman Munir, the deputy minister for counter-narcotics, said satellites had found 26,800 hectares of drug crops. Three days later he put the area destroyed at 26,500. In comments printed in the UN’s report, the ministry gave cultivation as 24,000 hectares. Officials told Reuters it was about half the UN’s figure. Every one of these estimates is more than double the area the UN measured last year. The UN says it cannot verify any of the eradication claims.

Nobody who negotiated with the Taliban in Doha will be shocked that they fudge a statistic. More striking is how many governments took the ban on trust. Hibatullah Akhundzada, the movement’s supreme leader, outlawed poppy in April 2022. Planting collapsed the next spring, and the fall became Kabul’s strongest argument for engagement. As late as June the UN was reporting that output had dropped by 95%. One good season was treated as proof of character.

The ban made some people rich. It left opium already in storage untouched, and scarcity lifted its value: a kilogram that fetched under $100 before 2022 sells for about $500 today. In 2022 farmers and traders in Helmand told the Globe and Mail that Taliban allies had bought and stored tonnes of opium before the order was issued. One farmer put it plainly: “The opium trade is now run by the local Taliban commanders.” Experts interviewed for a 2024 study in Small Wars & Insurgencies said major traffickers now hold official positions in the regime. Traffickers have lived off those stocks for four years. The UN now thinks they are running low, and sees early signs of a heroin shortage in Europe. The poppies have returned just as the warehouses empty.

The ban is also enforced selectively. Most of this year’s planting is in the north-east, where cultivation rose from under 7,000 hectares to almost 33,000, much of it in Badakhshan, a Tajik-majority province far from the Taliban’s Pashtun heartland. There, eradication arrives with rifles. The UN mission recorded at least ten deaths when Taliban forces put down protests in May and June 2025, and in May this year a child was killed in Argo district. The protesters’ demand has barely changed in three years: enforce the ban equally in Kandahar and Helmand. A former Badakhshan provincial councillor says cultivation continues unchecked elsewhere while his province is punished. The UN’s figures for the south-west, the Taliban’s home ground, show planting almost quadrupled this year, from 1,300 hectares to over 5,000.

A ban that can be relaxed can also be sold. Kabul presents its campaign as a service to the world and the cost of replacing poppy as a bill for donors to settle. Mr Qani says sustainable livelihoods are essential to success. The UN’s own representative in Afghanistan concedes that outside support has fallen short. Meanwhile a third of Afghanistan’s nutrition centres have closed for lack of funds. Each new hectare of poppy strengthens Kabul’s hand in the next donor meeting.

The Drug Satellites Miss

Opium has to be grown, and a field can be photographed. Methamphetamine is cooked indoors. Afghan producers began with ephedra, a wild highland shrub, but the UN’s World Drug Report for 2026 notes a shift towards ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, precursor chemicals that arrive by lorry. The same report names Afghanistan as Asia’s leading departure point for seized methamphetamine between 2021 and 2024. An investigation by Afghanistan International last year found Taliban commanders, former traffickers and local officials involved in the ephedra trade, with district governors in Kandahar named by residents. The ministry’s own claim to have closed 301 laboratories this year is the most candid estimate Kabul has offered of the industry’s size.

Iran catches much of the output. Its seizures rose from 30,393kg in 2022 to 40,453kg in 2025. In the first quarter of this year it broke up five multi-tonne consignments bound for Europe through Turkey.

The Road to Makran

The southern route runs through Pakistan. On October 6th the Anti-Narcotics Force found 1,363kg of methamphetamine and 2,454kg of hashish in a compound in Kech, near the Makran coast, awaiting a boat. In August a container at Karachi yielded 200kg and an arrest: Ehsan Ullah, an Afghan the ANF names as the network’s organiser. Another 463kg of crystal meth, worth $21m, was seized in Colombo after America’s Drug Enforcement Administration and the ANF tracked it out of Karachi.

Kabul denies all of it. Its foreign ministry calls the “Afghan-origin” label unfounded. Mr Qani says most drugs, synthetics included, are smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, a trade that would have to run uphill into the Hindu Kush. On October 30th the foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, told a meeting of regional border commanders that drug cultivation in neighbouring countries had become a serious concern.

The networks have also crossed the border. David Mansfield, who has studied Afghanistan’s drug economy every year since 1997, reported in August that since the Taliban squeezed production at home in 2022, ephedrine operations displaced from Afghanistan have pushed into Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan, carrying their chemists and methods with them. They have chosen a province already fighting an insurgency, where every route to the Makran coast passes through contested ground. Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force has spent the year intercepting what they produce. Last month Shafqat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s ambassador to the UAE, warned a UN crime congress in Abu Dhabi of growing opium and synthetic-drug production in Afghanistan, and of its links to terrorism. The UN has since confirmed the opium. Nobody is yet counting the meth.

Bottom Line

Afghanistan’s opium harvest rose almost fivefold in 2026, earning traders about $525m. The Taliban have given at least five figures for the season, each placing cultivation above twice last year’s level, while insisting almost nothing survived. Enforcement falls hardest on Badakhshan while planting in the Taliban’s southern heartland nearly quadrupled. Afghan methamphetamine, increasingly made from imported precursors, leaves through Iran and Pakistan’s Makran coast, and operations displaced from Afghanistan have pushed into Balochistan.

Unresolved

The ministry has not reconciled its figures of 24,000, 26,500, 26,800 and “almost zero”. The UN cannot verify the Taliban’s eradication data. No reliable estimate exists of how much methamphetamine Afghanistan makes, since seizures record routes rather than output. Nor is it known how much opium remains in storage, or who holds it.

What To Watch

The UN has promised further analysis of the eradication claims. The next planting season will show whether Kandahar and Helmand are spared again, and heroin prices in Europe will show how fast the stockpiles are draining. Second-half seizure totals from Iran and Pakistan, and any new laboratory finds in Balochistan, will measure how far the synthetic trade has spread. The Pakistan Playbook will keep reporting on each, starting with the next consignment to leave a compound in Kech for the Arabian Sea. ■