Poppies and power in Afghanistan

Afghanistan's opium industry has been depicted as arising from a general atmosphere of conflict, chaos and lawlessness – reinforcing stereotypes about the region. But the country's history reveals that, contrary to popular discourse, the trade of drugs, and opium in particular, was an important part of Afghanistan's state formation. This is the central focus of historian James Tharin Bradford's recently published book, Poppies, Politics and Power. Himal Southasian interviewed Bradford, an assistant professor of history at Berklee College of Music, about misconceptions around Afghanistan's history, the role of the global 'war on drugs' on the opium crisis, and the difficulties he encountered in conducting research for the book.

The interview has been edited for concision.

Himal Southasian: Most writings on opium and its development as an industry in Afghanistan infer causation from the Afghan-Soviet War (1979-1989). This is then tied to the 2001 US invasion and its failures in peacekeeping and state rebuilding. What is wrong with this framework and how does it impact our understanding of Afghanistan?

James Tharin Bradford: When Alfred McCoy wrote the Politics of Heroin in 1972, it transformed the way people viewed the drug trade, its transition from a free market to a more prohibitive one, and its ties to broader machinations of the Cold War and globalisation. Unfortunately for Afghanistan, much of the 'history' of the drug trade thereafter centred on the more recent and visible manifestation of Afghanistan's entry into the late stages of the Cold War. War, statelessness, and instability became defining aspects of Afghanistan, and in turn, were intrinsically linked to the ever growing and influential drug trade. But as a historian, this just seemed incomplete. How could Afghanistan, in the middle of Asia, have no 'drug history' when much of the rest of the continent had such a rich, and complex, historical relationship with the cultivation, trade, and use of opium and cannabis?

The limited historiography of drugs in Afghanistan reinforced many common tropes about Afghanistan – that it was defined exclusively by conflict and chaos and was isolated from global processes. I found this narrative to rest on the assumption that drug trade in Afghanistan was always outside the legal norms of the international drug trade and contrary to state ambitions: ie the drug trade was connected to terrorist or criminal organisations, illegal, and thus a barrier to the state, stability and peace. Furthermore, framing the Afghan drug trade around relatively recent events seemed to further substantiate Afghanistan's geographic and political isolation from the world. As I dove into this topic more, I soon realised how little was known about drugs in Afghanistan, how complicated the relationship between drugs, Afghan society, and governance truly was, and the impact of global forces, such as the drug trade and the international drug control regime on Afghanistan's trade in drugs.