Joining us now is Seth Harp. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and he's the author of the forthcoming book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, in July of 2025. We're excited to see him. Thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So the reason we booked you is not only because of your forthcoming book subject, but because of a graph that really caught our eye. Let's put this up there on the screen.
A lot of perhaps counterintuitive, depending on what you thought about the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. But according to the Financial Times, Poppy growing in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, has fallen 99% since the U.S. withdrawal. So, Seth, considering the title of your book, considering a lot of discussion over the last 20 years about opium and the U.S. role in cultivation, poppy and heroin, what do you make of that graph?
And considering what you're writing about, what can you shed light on some of the background of why that is? Well, it's really stunning, and it's only now that the Taliban has been in control of Afghanistan for several years, that we're able to fully judge what the true history of the heroin trade in Afghanistan really was and its significance from 2001 to 2021 during the 20 years of U.S. occupation before the Taliban took over and completely eradicated the country's entire poppy crop. It was kind of difficult to say who was responsible for that drug production.
But actually what the Taliban have just done in 2022 was an exact repeat of something that they did in 2001, which was to eradicate all drug production from Afghanistan, poppy cultivation, and the synthesis of heroin in laboratories. And in the process of writing the book, I learned a lot about the heroin trade in Afghanistan and compiled basically a list of... Facts that I think every American citizen should know about their government support for international drug cartels, which actually goes back to the 1980s.
So I'd be happy to run down or if you guys just want to ask questions in general about the subject. Go ahead. Anyway. Tell us what you got.
Yeah. Like I said, U.S. intervention or excuse me, U.S. support for drug traffickers in Afghanistan goes back to the 1980s when the Soviet Army occupied. Afghanistan and a lot of people are familiar with the so-called Charlie Wilson's war, the America's covert war in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviet occupiers by arming and funding certain warlords to wage guerrilla war in that country against the Russians.
And it's also pretty well known that a lot of these people were radical Islamists and that this covert uh program led to the formation of al-qaeda uh and the events that that led to 9-11 or contributed to it that was in the background of it um but it's less well known that those same uh mujahideen as they're often called many of them were deeply involved in the drug trade this is something that we don't hear much about although it is out there in the open i think that steve cole writing for the washington post in the early 90s was one of the first to describe this Gulbuddin Hekwinsar and Nassim Akhundzada were two of the biggest recipients of CIA cash and arms, and both of them were two of the biggest narcos in Afghanistan. And once the Russians had successfully been driven out, they set about transforming Afghanistan essentially into the world's largest poppy plantation because the geography and climate of Afghanistan are very advantageous for the cultivation of poppy. And through their brutal methods, they forced.
a lot of Afghanistan's peasantry into conditions of essentially narco-surfdom and obligated people to plant poppy when in the past they've been planting food crops or fruit. And so the 1990s in Afghanistan is a kind of forgotten interlude, but there was a drug war there, essentially the same as there was a drug war in Colombia, and there is one in Mexico today. And the Taliban actually emerged as a reaction to the infighting between these warlords.
And, you know, we hear a lot about the Taliban's wicked ideology and their repression of women and how they don't allow music and kites and things like that. But we never hear about their anti-narcotics agenda. But that was actually fundamental to their ideological identity from the very beginning.
The Taliban, as you might imagine, being such a conservative movement, didn't look kindly upon the production of drugs or the consumption of drugs either. And as I alluded to. A moment ago, once they had consolidated control of Afghanistan's major population centers after a civil war in the 1990s, they completely eradicated all of the heroin production that was taking place in Afghanistan.
And in 2001, that eradication effort was completed in the summer of 2001. And some experts at the time described it as the most dramatic event in the history of drugs markets, the history of illegal drug markets. They completely decimated the world supply of heroin, eliminated something like 95% of heroin from the global black market. That was, as I said, in the summer of 2001. Seth, let me pause you for one second because I have a question about that piece that also connects with today. Yeah. What sort of tactics did they use to have this level of complete eradication?
That's a good question. As far as I can tell, they just went around telling people, hey, you can't do that anymore. They didn't really, they didn't dump pesticides from airplanes. They didn't use any of the heavy-handed eradication methods that the U.S. and proxy forces or client states have used.
In countries like Colombia, for example, you know, very low-tech methods using sticks to beat down the plants or tractors to uproot fields. And were people just afraid of the consequences of not listening to the Taliban? That's a good question.
I'm not sure. I suppose so. I mean, the obvious answer is yes, the Taliban.
The government has a monopoly on the use of force there, and people didn't disobey when told to stop growing poppy, so surely. like the consequences. But I'm not able to find very many reports of violence in this latest eradication campaign. A few sporadic shootings between traffickers that resisted. But for the most part, yeah, they seem to have just asked people nicely.
And so when we invade Afghanistan, what is our relationship to the cultivation of poppy? Well, so the U.S. invaded Afghanistan just five months after they had completely eradicated poppy from Afghanistan. And that invasion force was led by the CIA, backed by JSOC and Delta Force.
And they immediately teamed up with many of the same narco warlords that had taken refuge in the north of the country, which was the only part of Afghanistan where heroin production was still taking place. And we called that group of militias and warlords the Northern Alliance. And not all of them. I don't want to say that every single one of the individuals that... was part of the effort was involved in drug trafficking but many of them especially the tajik and uzbek warlords you know rashid dostum i think chief among them were deeply involved in the international heroin trade uh and the cia knew it um and when they installed the new afghan government led by hamid karzai one of the government's first actions was to legalize poppy cultivation yes the fact that went almost entirely unremarked in the american press um within a single year Heroin production in Afghanistan was back to pre-Taliban highs of production.
There were known narcotics traffickers in control of all of Afghanistan's major heroin-producing areas, including the Helmand, Narmahar, Kandahar, Jalalabad. All these areas where either poppy was cultivated or heroin was trafficked internationally. And within eight years, Afghanistan was producing 10 times more heroin than the rest of the world combined. It was the largest drug output.
It was the largest production of heroin or any drug in world history. I mean, I really want to emphasize the scale of this. Heroin in Afghanistan, the production of it was around topped out and stayed at the level of about a thousand metric tons of pure heroin per year for almost 15 to 20 years.
on end, that's double the global demand for heroin. So they're producing twice as much heroin as the entire world can absorb. Mexico is a second place producer, only puts out about 50 tons of heroin a year.
Colombia, 20 tons of heroin. The only other country that's even on the map is Myanmar. And I think they produce like one or two tons.
And again, Afghanistan producing a thousand tons of pure heroin per year. So Seth... To stick within the title of your book, what is the grand role of our own government in not only the cultivation?
I know at one point we were actively wanting to create cultivation of poppy. In fact, in preparation for this segment, I found criticism of the Taliban from the U.S. Institute of Peace by some Afghan scholar who was like, why Taliban shutting down opium production is bad for Afghanistan? I was like, what? I mean, this seems a little bit too.
naked here. So is the cynical take correct? I mean, what exactly was going on in terms of our own government, our military in helping stoke this production? It's very hard to understand what these people were thinking.
in allowing this. They didn't talk about it very much during the war. And to the extent they did, it was very much in line with that article that you just referenced by the U.S. Institute for Peace, basically implicitly saying, hey, this is good for the economy. This is a way for us.
Like a jobs program. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But at the same time, we always heard during the war that the Taliban were responsible for this and that the insurgency. and all the drug production were really two sides of the same coin.
From our politicians, from our most prestigious and trusted institutions and media, we always heard that the Taliban were basically, were narco-terrorists, was the term that I think was invented in the early 2000s to describe this. And anytime we heard about the drug production that was going on in Afghanistan, which was very much soft-pedaled, very much not in the news, but to the extent it was, we always heard the Taliban were responsible. Now, in looking into this, I found that there's no evidence to support it at all.
And I don't claim that my research skills are exhaustive, but if there's anyone out there who can find a case of a named Taliban individual who was seized or apprehended or convicted or it was otherwise shown for a fact that they were producing or trafficking drugs, please get in touch because I wasn't able to find a single case of that. And, you know, you don't have to take my word for it, because in 2018, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, Saigar, they put out a report retrospective on narcotics in Afghanistan. And this is a U.S. government publication.
So, you know, they kind of couch it in delicate terms. But it's very clear from reading that report that their conclusion that they came to was that there was never any evidence at all to back up the idea that the Taliban were either. profiting from the direct participation in drug production, or we're even taxing it, as we sometimes heard. The best I think you could say is that at times, some groups that were called Taliban, which is actually a more diverse coalition than we realize, some of those groups at times in certain places may have levied a tax on other drug traffickers. But beyond that, there's no reason to think that the Taliban...
participated in the drug trade. It also goes against, you know, their, as I mentioned before, their original ideological identity of being a force that was against narcotics. The Taliban would occasionally put out edicts that banned their own fighters from using drugs or participating at all in the drug trade. We never gave them any credit for that, but in fact, it seems to be pretty consistent on their part.
Now, And Seth, to the economic point, Afghanistan, obviously a poor country under sanctions by the U.S. that we also withheld a significant chunk of their central bank reserves. You know, post after after we left, there was a sort of economic freefall, at least for a certain period of time. So what has been the economic impact of the total eradication of poppy production when it was so central to the agricultural economy?
Well, it's hard to say. Probably not good for the farmers that have immediately lost out on their poppy revenue that they were making. But Afghanistan has really serious economic problems as a result of the crushing international sanctions that are on them and the fact that the U.S. basically just stole all the money that was in their bank by freezing it. So Afghanistan is in a terrible economic situation right now, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Taliban was willing. to eliminate what had been the majority of their GDP, it really shows that they were determined to eliminate this trade from Afghanistan.
Yeah. I mean, I think what's shocking about this is that it turns a lot of stuff on its head. Like you said, Seth, I worked in that space for a long time. I covered the Pentagon during the Afghan war.
We heard constantly, narco-terrorists, that these people were involved in drug production, that they were much more drug lords, and they were this. But then it's a little bit counter if all of that gets shut down. the moment that they actually take over the country. You would presume that the inverse would happen, that when you have total control over state resources, you would ramp opium production up.
So then if they weren't producing the opium, somebody was, and somebody was profiting. I'm sure you don't want to give away too much, but to what role can you speak about from your own book to the deep involvement of the U.S. military forces in perhaps not only officially sanctioning this, but getting involved in the actual moving and selling of drugs? Well, that same Saigar report that I mentioned a moment ago is unequivocal about this.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government at every level and at every G. The geographic region of Afghanistan was either directly involved in producing drugs or was profiting from it in the form of bribes or taxation. All of the major warlords who comprised the U.S. client state, you know, under Hamid Karzai originally and under Ashraf Ghani later, were known narcotics traffickers.
You know, Fahim Khan was Hamid Karzai's defense minister. He was a big time drug trafficker. Hamid Karzai's half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was the kingpin of Kandahar who had this as they would say in Mexico the derecho de piso over the entire Helmand ability to charge drug traffickers the commission to move drugs through Kandahar I mentioned Rashid Dostum a moment ago up on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan he was a major drug lord the CIA worked closely with him Hazarat Ali in Jalalabad, another big time drug trafficker controlling the drug trade from Afghanistan to India, which absorbed a lot of the heroin during this time.
And these are all people who have names whose role is known. And the way that it was done out in the open is really kind of jaw dropping. And it's not just the people at the top. It's as the Saigar report said, people at every single level in every department of the Afghan government were directly involved. in the drug trade.
And if you ask any grunt who served in Afghanistan, a Marine, whatever, they'll tell you that the security forces of these people under these warlords, they use drugs constantly and were often too stoned on hashish or opium to even go out on patrol. So the Afghan client state was the world's biggest drug cartel. And it was directly backed at all times by JSOC, the CIA, and the whole of the US government. And past instances of... like CIA complicity in the drug trade that we're familiar with pale in comparison.
There's the whole dark alliance thing that reporter Gary Webb revealed in the 90s that the CIA knew that the Nicaraguan Contras were trafficking cocaine from Colombia through Mexico into the United States at the time of the crack boom. I mean, that was significant, but there's just no comparing the scale of this. As I mentioned before, for 20 years, Afghanistan inundated the entire world with extremely cheap, extremely potent, and extremely high quality heroin.
It was available everywhere and that changed. I mean, that had a huge impact on history, an extremely deleterious effect on the social fabric of many countries that directly surround Afghanistan, including Iran had a terrible heroin crisis during this time. China as well had to really crack down.
heroin trafficking through Jianjiang, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, in the Uyghur occupied part of China. Russia suffered a terrible heroin crisis during this time, all of Europe and, of course, America. And it was all the result of having a huge glut of very high quality and very cheap product that was available. Seth, my last question for you is an intentionally naive one. How does this square?
with the U.S.'s relatively draconian anti-drug policies? Well, when you say relatively draconian anti-drug policies, I guess you're referring to the criminal penalties that are available to punish traffickers that are caught here in the U.S. Well, it just goes to show that, you know, the government really kind of, instead of fighting a drug war, it's more that they pick winners and losers in the game and say who can. who is allowed to traffic drugs internationally.
If the DEA at any point had wanted to look at Afghanistan and say, you know, sometimes when they say, describe a drug trafficking organization in Mexico, let's say, and create like an organization chart and put this guy at the top and say, these guys are his lieutenants. A lot of that, there's some, you know, there's some artistic license that goes into that. These groups are not as coherent as you might think.
My point is that if at any point they had wanted to look in at Afghanistan and describe what was going on there as a cartel and create like an organization chart, it easily could have been portrayed as, you know, this is the most profitable, productive, and dangerous drug trafficking organization in the entire world. And it's inundating the United States with heroin because the heroin crisis in the United States perfectly coincided with this time period. And there's endless reports from the early 2000s from medical professionals. and others, especially county sheriffs, talking about how they were seeing a much increased supply of heroin in the most remote rural counties in the United States, not just the cities.
The whole country was saturated by heroin that was white in color, high quality, high potency. Now, as a caveat, the DEA says that none of this came from Afghanistan. They say that the United States alone in the world is the only country untouched by Afghan heroin.
And that's a claim that you see sometimes repeated in mainstream media accounts during this time. And in my book, I'm going to go into all the reasons why I don't think that's true at all. I think that all of that supply or the great majority of that supply that directly caused the heroin crisis in America was a consequence of the war in Afghanistan. I can't wait to read it.
Yeah, we're going to let you now get back to writing that book because we're now all dying to read it and see what else you have to say. And I hope you'll come back on when the book is published, if not before, and explain. in detail your additional findings there. Thank you so much for joining us today, though. It's been eye-opening.
Absolutely eye-opening. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Definitely. Thanks for having me.
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