Meth’s route from Taliban-run Afghanistan to Australia
It started well before the fall of Kabul in mid-2021. According to an expert with a global counter-narcotics agency, the Taliban had by then long been including what he called “starter packs” with shipments of heroin.
The packs were a way to introduce clients to a drug that would soon define the Taliban’s trade: methamphetamine. The fundamentalist group had decided its future was no longer in the poppy fields that produced opiates but rather in the base ingredients for meth.
“They will send you in 100 kilograms of heroin and add five kilos of meth for free,” the agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said of the Taliban. “Just to get that user base started.”
The move into methamphetamine has allowed the Taliban to repurpose its vast heroin empire into an even more profitable, dangerous and deadly business, which funds its power in Afghanistan.
Much of that meth reaches Australia, which is the world’s third-biggest market for the drug.
The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, after a 20-year insurgency largely funded with the proceeds from heroin. For decades, the Taliban has been one of the world’s major drug trafficking gangs, comparable to the Colombian and Mexican cartels that control the cocaine trade.
With few other visible means of support, the Taliban’s major source of income has been drugs, supplemented with mining, gun running, artefact smuggling and other organised crime activities.
Until recently, the Taliban’s part of the drug trade has been to supply almost all the world’s illicit heroin, from poppies grown mostly in the fertile river valley of southern Helmand province.
In April 2022, however, the group’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, announced a ban on the cultivation of the poppy.
The poppy ban, which has been successful thanks to violent enforcement, caused panic among heroin dealers and users worldwide, who feared it would lead to immediate shortages.
That, too, seems to have been part of the Taliban’s profit planning: the value of huge stockpiles of raw opium, believed to be held by some of the group’s senior leaders and unlikely to run low for many years, soared.
Although the ban was announced in 2022, it didn’t come into effect for a year, giving the drug lords and close associates of the Taliban leadership plenty of time to boost production and stocks.
At the same time, the Taliban shifted its focus to the production of methamphetamine. The poppy ban was greeted in some corners as a sign of good-governance intentions. All it signalled, however, was a change of product.
If experts and anecdotal evidence are to be believed, meth is set to make the Taliban unassailably wealthy and will help entrench its power while also funding the dozens of terrorist and jihadist organisations that now enjoy its protection in Afghanistan.
If experts and anecdotal evidence are to be believed, meth is set to make the Taliban unassailably wealthy and will help entrench its power while also funding the dozens of terrorist and jihadist organisations that now enjoy its protection in Afghanistan.
Gram for gram, there is little comparison in the money that can be made from heroin and meth. Once it had worked out the economics, the Taliban saw sense in making the switch. On the streets of Australia, for instance, a kilogram of Afghan heroin, even before the poppy-growing ban, was worth about US$250,000. The same quantity of meth had a street value of $700,000.
Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the Berlin- and New York-based Counter Extremism Project, says drugs are “just one of the standard income streams for terrorism financing”.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Taliban, up until its victory in the war for control of Afghanistan, was earning almost $3 billion a year from trafficking opium and heroin, which accounted for as much as 14 per cent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.
The Taliban’s capture of Afghanistan presents a huge, but largely unacknowledged, danger to world security. The Taliban is now protecting dozens of banned and sanctioned terrorist organisations that fought alongside it throughout the 20-year war against the Western-supported republic.
The close relationship between Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda has never diminished, despite lies told to negotiators during the “peace negotiations” that led to the 2020 Doha agreement and the catastrophic American withdrawal approved by United Sates President Joe Biden the following year.
Nevertheless, the Taliban is receiving billions of dollars in international aid – including shipments of about US$40 million in cash every week – that is meant to help alleviate the suffering its regime is causing.
Much of the aid, including food, is being stolen by the Taliban for its supporters, a necessary buy-off as it is incapable of, or uninterested in, developing the economy and creating jobs.
Women and girls are largely forced to remain indoors, banned from work, school, sports and other normal activities they had legal rights to during the 20 years of the republic.
Non-Pashtun ethnic groups such as the Hazaras are regularly targeted, as are journalists, civil society and rights activists, former government workers and members of the republic’s security forces.
Those dozens of terrorist groups, documented by the United Nations Security Council, pose direct threats to neighbouring countries and the West.
Al Qaeda is once again running militant training camps across Afghanistan, and using the shared proceeds of drugs and mining to fund its affiliates in the Middle East and Africa.
Yet Taliban diplomats have been welcomed in some capitals, including Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad and Tehran. Türkiye, Japan, the European Union, the Central Asian states, China and Russia have ambassadors posted to Kabul.
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s latest analysis of waste-water data found a 17 per cent increase in consumption of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA, to 16.5 tonnes, in the year to August 2023. Of the A$12.4 billion spent on drugs, the survey found 85 per cent went on meth.
Australian Federal Police intercepted 98 kilograms of meth late last year it said was smuggled inside farming equipment by a gang with alleged links to an Afghan crime network.
Intercepts in neighbouring countries, including Pakistan and Iran, are growing, as well as at major ports such as Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and Antwerp, in Belgium.
As former US president Donald Trump struck his deal in February 2020 to withdraw from the country, ensuring the collapse of the Afghan republic, it was already becoming clear the Taliban had identified methamphetamine as a future goldmine.
A counter-narcotics agent with the Afghan republic government describes the Taliban plan as “a coming catastrophe for the world”.
Meth is cheaper to make than heroin and more addictive, he says, and warns that the Taliban had identified the product, was ramping up production and already had the means of getting it to market via its well-established global network.
In late 2020, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reported on the rapid emergence of meth produced from the ephedra plant, which grows wild in Afghanistan. The report warned methamphetamine from Afghanistan was turning up as far afield as Sri Lanka, Indonesia and southern and eastern Africa.
Satellite photographs in the report show the compounds where the meth is being processed from ephedra plants.
The hands-on method of production with the plant is messy and requires manpower the Taliban doesn’t want to pay for.
That led to the importation of industrial ephedrines, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report last year, that were easier and cheaper to use. Those processing centres are hardly visible on satellite images.
The success of the poppy ban and the switch from heroin to meth has shown the Taliban can get things done, however coercively. It has also demonstrated its priorities. Farmers banned from growing poppies have not been offered alternative livelihoods and cannot simply turn to other cash crops, such as wheat, because there is no internal market.
Yet few governments and agencies appear to recognise the security risks of Afghanistan’s new drug economy – including intensified violence for control of distribution, increased addiction and a likely increase in illegal migration as unemployed Afghan farmers seek work abroad.
The Taliban is the new godfather of meth. And there’s nothing anyone, anywhere, seems to be doing about it.