3 billion dollars a year made from opiates every year. 5 percent goes to the Taliban, 20 to the farmers, and the rest to bribes of officials, specifically, officials the U.S. and NATO approve of. The UNODC,is a group that reports but does not acquire the percentages of officials that receive bribes. The U.S. supported individuals who were known to be corrupt. They did it so knowing these individuals would tax the opium trade and give us some of that money. The president of Afghanistan, Wali Karzai, and one of the president’s aides had requisitioned a truck of heroin that the government had seized.The truck was seized by Counter Narcotics and found 110 pounds of herion. American officials had been meeting with Karzai and were fully aware of his drug affiliations surprisingly. It is interesting how a UNODC claimed that 220 billion dollars gets laundered annually thorugh the Afghan financial system, only .2 pecent of that money gets seized and frozen. Eventually America did get involved with the drug trade in Afghanistan.
During the first invasion it was more of a statement they were trying to make. They wanted to make it clear that that no one was going to scuffle with Washington. No positive was done, only destroying of crops and livelihoods. America backed some Afghani’s to gain money and leverage throughout the country. Saying that they would not deal with internal affairs. To attack the fields would be a direct blow against themselves. And America needed the drug money to pay off militias to assist them in the fight. In 2005 Rumsfeld was meeting with Afghani officals who were locally called the ‘godfathers of drug trafficking’. It was for this reason that America ignored the issue for so many years. A team of Green Berets were ordered to not disrupt any opium sales. A reason that America would not attack the fields was because they were worried that the farmers would join the Taliban to fight back. The Taliban said it would pay give a farmer financial assistance in exchange for fighting America. So attacking poppy would have directly sent recruits to the Taliban.
America began a five step plan to fight opium later in