AAN’s latest report, by German scholar Citha D. Maass and released in cooperation with SWP Berlin, looks into the beginnings and evolution of drug production in Afghanistan during its three decade-long war.
Starting with the Western-supported anti-Soviet jihad in 1979, drug production became a major basis for the country’s war economy. After the fall of the Taleban regime in 2001, the US rehabilitated the former mujahedin leaders who had largely funded themselves by trafficking drugs and from 2002 onwards, President Hamed Karzai co-opted these ‘war entrepreneurs’ into the new political system, thus consolidating a new system which the author describes as a ‘criminalized peace’.
An alliance of interests links the weak Karzai government ! to the co-opted former warlords. It ensures that the illicit economy, based on a drug economy, dominates the rudimentary licit economic sector, while the power networks of the criminalized peace order limit President Karzai’s room for manoeuvre to carry out necessary reforms. The author argues that it will take 20 to 30 years to weaken the drugs industry and to establish a more stable peace order in Afghanistan.
