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The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an office created by Congress in 2008 to oversee waste and fraud in US government expenditures in Afghanistan, released a report in October communicating that Afghanistan poppy production reached an unprecedented high point in 2013, even while being preceded by more than a decade of prodigious production.

This is despite the fact that the US government has devoted $7.6 billion to squashing the booming opium trade since its revival at the start of the US invasion.

The report was published along with an invitation to written responses from various departments of the US government, responses that unanimously blamed the situation on the US puppet government in Afghanistan, stating that it had not assisted aggressively enough with counter-narcotics efforts. The idea of the US government denying responsibility for the misdeeds of a state it installed through a rigged election to promote the objectives of the occupation, is absurd on its face. A review of the history of US involvement in the Central Asian opium trade up through the 2001 intervention, however, reveals even deeper responsibility.

Causes of Increased Opium Production Since 2001

As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported this year, dramatically increased opium production since 2001 in Afghanistan is one of the primary causes of a current surge in heroin use throughout Europe and Asia.

This most recent explosion in cultivation and sale of poppy is due, first of all, to the overthrow of the Taliban, which had, with the pressure and assistance of the UN, enforced a brief but successful opium ban in 2000. UN research released just a week after the invasion began reported poppy production as being down by 91 percent since 2000. The subsequent opium explosion is attributable also to the importance of the poppy crop as a funding source both for the Taliban insurgency and for corrupt officials at all levels of the Karzai administration.

The US government has attempted various methods of reducing opium production, from eradicating opium fields to providing farmers with alternative crops, to prosecuting traffickers and confiscating their product. Evidently, none of these methods has had an impact, most fundamentally because demand for opium from international consumers, as well as the demand of the Taliban and the state for bribes from this pool of profit, has remained unaffected.

Actually, a plausible argument can be made that directly seizing crops increases profits acquired by the higher-skilled smugglers then required, which in turn makes available a larger source of funds for corrupting the agents of the state, who ensure the safe passage of crops to the market. Corruption apparently reaches higher levels of government as well.