Drug trafficking

Corrupt Combatants Fight for Control of Lucrative Afghan Drug Trade

This year’s first poppy harvest season has just begun, and the bright red flowers are garish splotches across the heavily irrigated landscape. But unlike in previous years, there will be no serious efforts to eradicate the opium crop in Helmand, because of a combination of Taliban advances and out-of-control corruption, with both sides battling over the drug trade.

Helmand is also the deadliest province in Afghanistan, with more than half of all the country’s combat fatalities in the last year, Afghan officials have confirmed.

President Ashraf Ghani’s envoy for Helmand, Maj. Gen. Abdul Jabar Qahraman, has been given the task of fixing the situation. He says that a big part of the reason Helmand has become so difficult is that so many of its combatants have a financial stake in the continuation of the drug trade and of the war itself — something he hopes to undo by getting all sides talking to one another.