The Taliban's primary source of income to support their insurgency is opium.
End of Taliban will bring rise in heroin
By Richard Lloyd Parry in Islamabad
19 October 2001
The defeat of the Taliban would result in a surge in opium production, which has beenvirtually halted in Afghanistan by the Kabul regime over the last year, United Nations officials have warned.
A new UN survey reveals that the Taliban have completed one of the quickest and most successful drug elimination programmes in history.
The area of land given over to growing opium poppies in 2001 fell by 91 per cent compared with the year before, according to the UN Drug Control Programme's (UNDCP) annual survey of Afghanistan. Production of fresh opium, the raw material for heroin, went down by an unprecedented 94 per cent, from 3,276 tonnes to 185 tonnes.
Almost all Afghan opium this year came out of territories controlled by America's ally in the assault on Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance. Because of a ban on poppy farming, only one in 25 of Afghanistan's opium poppies was being grown in Taliban areas.