Pak-Afghan Drug Trade in Historical Perspective

Abstract

The growth in the global heroin supply during the past decade can be traced in large part to geopolitical developments around Afghanistan and two significant aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the Drug Enforcement Administration's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations. The CIA's aid to the Afghan mujaheddin (freedom fighters) in the 1980s expanded opium production in Afghanistan and linked Pakistan's nearby heroin laboratories to the world market. In 1989, after a decade as the sites of major CIA covert operations, Afghanistan and Pakistan ranked, respectively, as the world's largest and second largest suppliers of illicit heroin. In the decade that followed, these areas proved to be centers of international criminal activity, particularly narcotics-related crime, which posed a serious threat to democratic advances and economic accomplishment in that part of the world. In view of Afghanistan's emergence as a major opium source country and Pakistan's role as a leading processor and exporter of heroin, the entire world is faced with a challenge to advance political stability and improve international cooperation for counter-narcotics operations. A historical analysis of this phenomenon can serve as a useful insight to understand and thus help combat this global threat. In the highlands spanning Iran, Afghanistan, and northwest Pakistan, tribal farmers used to grow limited quantities of opium for the merchant caravans bound for the cities of Iran and India. During the decade of Cold War confrontations with the Soviet Union, however, CIA intervention provided the political protection and logistics linkage that joined Afghanistan's poppy fields, through Pakistan's land mass, to heroin markets in Europe and America. Now although Soviet forces are gone and CIA aid has slackened,