KABUL—The escalating war in Afghanistan is directly linked to the multibillion-dollar global trade in illicit drugs, as the Taliban seek to expand and consolidate control over the production and trafficking of narcotics and to diversify from heroin into methamphetamine, in what an Afghan counternarcotics officer called “a coming catastrophe for the world.”
Afghan and international counternarcotics experts said violence in Afghanistan has spiked in recent years alongside increased cultivation of opium poppies, used for heroin production, and ephedra, a plant that grows wild across the country and is being used to make methamphetamine. The officials described the Taliban as the world’s biggest drug cartel and said the group—which is fighting a fierce insurgency against the Afghan government—is using heroin transshipment routes to push methamphetamine into new markets in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe and Africa.
