The drug trade in Afghanistan has strengthened in recent years despite billions of dollars in U.S.-funded counternarcotics operations aimed at choking the Taliban's top revenue source, a government watchdog said Thursday.
The United States alone has spent $8.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan since 2002, but the country remains the world's largest producer of opium, with poppy cultivation reaching a record high last year.
According to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), opium cultivation in 2017 reached 1,265 square miles—more than 20 times the size of Washington, D.C.—marking a 63 percent increase from the year before. The unprecedented harvest could produce 900 tons of export-quality heroin and helps to fuel insurgent violence, SIGAR said.
"To put it bluntly, these numbers spell failure and the outlook is not encouraging," John Sopko, the special inspector general, said in prepared remarks at the New America think tank in Washington.
The United States in November retooled its air campaign to target Taliban drug labs as part of a sustained effort to undercut the group's $200 million-a-year opium trade. Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told reporters at the time that American and Afghan warplanes had taken out several of the labs, which he said numbered some 400 to 500 across the country.
SIGAR acknowledged the bombing campaign as a "good start," but said it was too early to determine the effectiveness given that setting up new labs takes three to four days at a cost of just a few hundred dollars.
The watchdog also noted the risk that expanded airstrikes by the United States and its coalition partners "could result in civilian deaths, alienate rural populations, and strengthen the insurgency."
Up to 590,000 people are employed in poppy cultivation, making narcotics one of the most successful sectors of the Afghan economy. SIGAR said any U.S. counternarcotics strategy must also include an economic development plan that promotes legal work opportunities for rural communities, which are heavily dependent on opium cultivation.
A spokesperson for the NATO Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan did not respond to a request for comment.
The study found that no program run by the United States or the Afghans over the past 15 years has resulted in a lasting reduction in poppy or opium production, warning, "until the security situation improves, there is little possibility of significantly curtailing opium poppy cultivation and drug production in Afghanistan."