ABSTRACT
Introduction Opium has a track record and its production and trade has been central to geopolitics for centuries. There is more than a degree of irony that a crop that old and new empires – the British in India, the Americans in South-East Asia – did so much to globalise should come back to haunt them.2 Opium is not new to Afghanistan – the country was officially exporting from 7 to 20 tons a year in the 1940s, to both the United States and Germany. According to reports from farmers in Badakhshan, they were selling opium directly to a state trading company based in the provincial capital well into the 1950s and 1960s. But there is no doubt that since the 1990s, and particularly since 2001, the cultivation of opium has dramatically expanded (see Table 10.1 below), both because of and despite the barrage of counter-narcotics measures that have been directed against it.
