Epilogue

This chapter details the connections between the contemporary drug trade and the historical antecedents analyzed in the previous chapters. It discusses how opium became an essential component of the war economy, and how many of the same problems that plagued counter-narcotics operations in previous decades continued to plague Afghanistan during the regimes of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Ultimately, the chapter examines how illicit drug production is intimately tied to issues of governance in Afghanistan, and how cornerstones of counter-narcotics operations, particularly interdiction and crop eradications, do little to improve governance, and instead, perpetuate the illicit drug trade, while reinforcing the legitimacy of anti-state groups, like the Taliban. To echo a recurring theme of the book, drug control was, and still is, deeply problematic and ineffective in Afghanistan.