With the fall of Kabul, the Taliban is in control over Afghanistan 20 years after US-led forces deposed the organization. This generated a sense of panic, leading to a mass exodus of foreign diplomatic missions and local Afghans and a commiserate return of human rights violations, which the United Nations had warned could become a full-blown “humanitarian catastrophe.”The return of Taliban to power not only bodes ill for the ordinary Afghan population but also threatens the regional and international security architecture in multiple ways.

Link Between Taliban And Drug Business

1. The vast majority of the world’s opium and heroin comes from Afghanistan, with production and exports centred in areas controlled by the Taliban, which has taxed the drugs heavily during their 20-year insurgency.
2. The United States spent around $8.6 billion from 2002 to 2017 in its doomed effort to combat the drugs trade, according to a 2018 report from the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR). These efforts included paying farmers to grow wheat or saffron, investing in transport links, as well as spraying defoliants on crops and bombing refining facilities.
3. At each step, the efforts to control drug trade were thwarted by Taliban fighters who controlled the main poppy-growing regions and derived hundreds of millions of dollars from the industry, according to US and erstwhile Afghan government estimates.
4. According to a report of the UN Office of Drug and Crime (UNODC), in 2020, there was a 37- percent increase in opium cultivation in Afghanistan. The Taliban had previously used drugs as a major revenue model, making drug trafficking a major part of the organization’s economy.
5. Previously, the Taliban had tried to ban poppy cultivation in the early 2000s to obtain international legitimacy; however, this met with a significant backlash, which forced the organization to change its stance. These factors led UNODC to claim that Afghanistan is on the path to becoming a “full-fledged narco-state.
6. With the Taliban’s lack of effective understanding of public administration and policy, the organization had always counted on drugs to fund its objectives. As per an official UN report, the Taliban earned more than USD 400 million between 2018 and 2019 from the drug trade.
7. As a landlocked nation, Afghanistan is heavily dependent on the various border passes like Zaranj in the Afghan–Iranian border for the transit of goods. The control of these border crossing points, with Tajikistan in the north, Iran in the west, and Pakistan in the south, allows the Taliban to traffic drugs more easily.
8. With the ever-growing demand of these illicit products, the coming of a supplier like the Taliban will boost the global drug problem, posing a major challenge to the regional nations and rendering them the epicenter for drug abuses and peddling.

Challenges In Forms Of Increased Drug Usage Due To Resurgence Of Taliban

1. Resurgence of Taliban will have profound implications for the global drug problem. In the era of globalization, an Afghan narco-state will not only pose a major challenge for the region including India but also provide greater supplies to the lucrative markets in Europe and North America, making it a major security issue.
2. According to the World Drug Report 2021, India has become a major centre of drug consumption. The report said India was also linked to shipments of drugs sold on 19 major darknet markets analysed between 2011 and 2020.
3. India is vulnerable to narcotic drug trafficking as it is located between two largest Opium producing regions of the world i.e. Golden Crescent in the west and Golden Triangle in the east. Drug trafficking and abuse also pose serious threats to our societies.
4. India’s interests in Afghanistan are manifold. It is not just to ensure that women’s and minorities’ rights are honoured but also to secure all of India’s investments in various infrastructure projects and also assurance on connectivity of which Afghanistan is a key link.

Measures To Counter The Issue Of Drug Usage

India began its fight against drugs way back in the 1980s. To meet the obligation as a signatory to international conventions, including those of the United Nations, India enacted the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) in 1985 and the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) was established.

1. Prevention of drug trafficking has to be accorded greater priority. At present, it forms part of the larger mandate of the border guarding forces to ‘prevent smuggling and any other illegal activity’.
2. Interagency coordination: Coordination among various agencies needs to be improved especially for Information/intelligence gathering regarding drug trafficking, its analysis and dissemination capabilities need to be strengthened.
3. Various domestic laws enacted for the control of drug trafficking (for example NDPS 1985) should be implemented strictly and severe punishments should be accorded to drug stockists.
4. The issue of corruption among the border guarding forces as well as in other concerned agencies has to be dealt with pragmatically. While officials found guilty of drug trafficking should be punished severely, suitable reward systems should also be introduced to provide incentives to the personnel to work diligently towards preventing drug trafficking.
5. An e-portal, SIMS (Seizure Information Management System) was launched in 2019 for digitisation of pan-India drug seizure data under the NDPS Act. The National Fund for Control of Drug Abuse was constituted to meet the expenses for fighting the drug menace.
6. India could support an international conference, such as a Bonn Conference 2.0, to discuss the transition of power in Afghanistan with all notable stakeholders, including Afghan politician Abdullah Abdullah, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and other former senior government officials still in Kabul.
7. India recently hosted a security conference with national security advisors of regional nations, including the Central Asian Republics, Russia and Iran, underscoring New Delhi’s continuing salience in the Afghan matrix.
8. The Delhi Declaration brought together like-minded nations, all of whom remain eager for an inclusive government in power in Afghanistan, rather than the current one that enjoys Pakistani patronage.

India has been enduring the scourge of drug trafficking for several decades. The country’s proximity to two of the world’s largest illicit opium-growing areas as well as various external and internal factors have contributed to it becoming a transit source and a destination for drugs. On the one hand, India has enacted stringent anti-drug laws, co-opted various voluntary organisations and sought to strengthen the physical security of its borders by various means, on the other hand, it has been seeking the cooperation of its neighbours and other countries through several bilateral and multilateral agreements. These efforts need to be complemented with more participative bottoms-up effort to end the criminal nexus while also pushing for behavioural change against drug abuse.