Twenty-five years after 9/11—VIII Narcoterrorism...

Summary

• The 2019 mutual evaluation by the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, endorsed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), identified drug trafficking, smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, extortion, illegal arms sales and exploitation of hawala or hundi among the country’s high-risk threats.
• 17–19; UNODC, Afghanistan Drug Insights, Volume 4: Drug trafficking and opiate stocks, 2025.
• UNODC, Opiates and Methamphetamine Trafficking on the Southern Route; UNODC, World Drug Report 2026, sections on opiates, seizures and trafficking methods.

AI Generated Summary

A narcotics consignment does not need to carry a terrorist flag to finance violence. The connection is often misunderstood because investigators, politicians and commentators look for a single ledger: heroin sold, money transferred, bomb purchased. Illicit economies rarely oblige with such tidy accounts. They operate through markets in transport, protection, weapons, influence and silence.

Our 1991 study described Pakistan’s crisis as the conjunction of “heroinisation and militarisation”. It did not claim that every trafficker was a militant or every militant a trafficker. It showed something more durable.

Drug money could buy armed protection, political access and social respectability. Weapons introduced for a foreign battlefield could protect laboratories, routes and private fortunes. By 2003, the drug-trap had become a debt-trap; after 9/11, both were absorbed into a security economy that paid handsomely for managing danger without removing its sources.¹

Part VII ended with four questions: who holds the gun, who receives the money, who can stop an investigation and whose child walks safely to school? Narcoterrorism begins where the answers overlap. It does not require a supreme commander sitting above a pyramid. A farmer may know only the buyer. A transporter may carry several commodities.

A checkpoint may collect a toll without owning the cargo. A militant group may tax a route, rent protection or extort a trader. A broker may settle accounts through hawala. Property, gold or a lawful business may receive the proceeds. Each actor can deny knowledge of the whole while keeping the whole alive.

This is why the phrase “narcoterrorism” must be used with care. Used recklessly, it turns suspicion into proof and converts an entire border population into a security category. Used precisely, it identifies a political economy in which drug trafficking and armed violence share routes, protection and financial services.

The relationship may be direct, indirect or merely opportunistic. What matters is evidence connecting particular actors, assets and transactions—not slogans attaching collective guilt to a province, tribe or refugee population.

Afghanistan’s recent experience demonstrates both the power and the limits of prohibition. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that poppy cultivation fell from about 232,000 hectares in 2022 to 10,800 in 2023 after the Taliban ban.

Cultivation rose to 12,800 hectares in 2024 and declined to 10,200 in 2025. Potential opium production in 2025 was estimated at 296 tonnes, capable of yielding roughly 22 to 34 tonnes of export-quality heroin.² That fall is real and should be acknowledged.

It is also not the same as the disappearance of the market. UNODC found that the 2025 trader price of dry opium, although lower than in 2024, remained more than five times the long-running pre-ban average. It identified several possible explanations for falling prices despite restricted new supply: release of stockpiles, market adjustment and production outside Afghanistan.