Name: Why Afghanistan is Headed to War With ALL its Neighbors
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T17:17:59.000Z
Duration: 48 min 52 s
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Afghanistan is a country that is almost synonymous with instability, violence and warfare.

For almost all of the past half a century of history, the country has been consumed by a perpetual state of conflict both within and beyond that has sucked in all of the world's superpowers at one time or another.

As the chaos within Afghanistan has always found a way to spread well beyond Afghanistan's own borders.

After a Soviet invasion throughout the 1980s, a civil war throughout the 1990s and an American invasion throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the next chapter of the continuous wars in Afghanistan began over the summer of 2021 as the United States began finalizing its long awaited withdrawal from the country.

against pretty much the entire world's expectations, the Taliban managed to rapidly overwhelm the US backed and created Afghan Republic and re establish their so called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan once again in the process.

By the end of the year, just like the Soviets before them, America's attempt at nation building a country in their own image in Afghanistan had also failed spectacularly.

But just because the Taliban has found itself back in power in the country again, doesn't mean that the decades of war and conflict in Afghanistan have ended.

Rather than the end of the book chronicling the wars in Afghanistan that began in the late 1970s, the Taliban reconquest of the country in 2021 has merely begun a new chapter in this overall story.

And this new chapter of Afghanistan's present and Future in the 2020s and beyond is probably going to be even worse than everything that's come before.

Because the Afghanistan of today, in 2024 and later, is a much, much larger threat to global security than it has ever been before.

And allow me to explain why, after the Taliban regained their power in the summer of 2021, after waging an insurgency for the past two decades, they have worked overtime to consolidate their position in the country.

Almost immediately after taking power, the United States and other outside entities sever nearly all of their foreign aid to the country, and

which amounted to about $8 billion a year and represented roughly 40% of Afghanistan's entire GDP, just getting obliterated at once.

On top of that huge issue, the vast majority of Afghanistan's roughly $9 billion worth of foreign exchange reserves that had been built up throughout the past 20 years were held in New York City.

And the US government immediately froze access to all of these assets.

Once the Taliban took back control of the country, Afghanistan was further locked out from the Western financial and banking transaction system, while virtually every Taliban leader themselves were already under strict pre existing US financial sanctions as well.

The result is that after the Taliban retook control over the country in mid-2021, the already impoverished and struggling economy absolutely nosedived even further.

Just take a look at this graph showing Afghanistan's GDP and current prices from 2008 to 2022.

During the period of the US backed Afghan Republic up until around 2012, the economy grew pretty consistently as tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid came gushing into the country to help it develop.

And then it stagnated for a bit until 2021 when the Taliban took back over and the economy crashed by more than 20% in a single year, undoing the entire past decade of economic progress in the country overnight.

It's now believed that more than 90% of Afghanistan's population lives beneath the poverty line, which is likely the highest percentage of any country in the world.

And more than half of the country's population remains highly dependent on foreign humanitarian aid simply for basic necessities.

The United States provided tens of billions of dollars worth of funding to the Afghan Republic for 20 years.

But with all of that over, now that the Taliban is back in charge, the Taliban needs to find a new source of outside capital to kickstart their economy again.

But that's very difficult for the Taliban to do because, well, they're the Taliban.

After seizing power, the Taliban has rapidly and ruthlessly suppressed the rights of women and girls within the country just like they did back in the 1990s.

Afghan women must now wear full body coverings and be escorted by a male guardian anytime they want to leave their homes and be in, which effectively condemns untold numbers of women who lack a male guardian or the funds to afford a full body covering to virtually indefinite house arrest.

Girls have been banned from receiving any education past middle school, women have been expelled from workplaces across the country.

And just last month In May of 2024, the Taliban confirmed that they were reintroducing the practice of stoning women to death, convicted of committing adultery.

So long as these draconian and gender discriminatory policies remain in place under the Taliban, the Western imposed financial sanctions on them will likely remain in force and their ability to gain international recognition will be challenging.

As to date in mid 2024, not a single outside country has ever formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, even though they've been the de facto government there for three years already.

The Taliban's lack of international recognition, the devastating sanctions imposed on them by the outside world and their own terrible geographic boundaries to trade as a landlocked and super mountainous country have all combined to cripple the Afghan economy.

But that doesn't mean that the Taliban hasn't found other ways of making money.

After the US hastily and chaotically withdrew from the country in 2021, they left behind an estimated $7.1 billion worth of military equipment that has almost all fallen into the hands of the Taliban by Now, by the US Department of Defense's own calculations, they left behind roughly 600,000 weapons of all different kinds of calibers and an unknown amount of ammunition, about 300 fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft, more than 80,000 vehicles of several different models, communications equipment, and

advanced higher end equipment like night vision goggles and biometric systems.

Even though much of this equipment will be of questionable value without the proper maintenance schedules and spare parts, it has still made the Taliban probably the most heavily armed extremist organization in human history.

And they've begun smuggling significant volumes of these arms to other extremist organizations around the world as a new major income source of with some US equipment left behind in Afghanistan having already been tracked down in militants operating in Kashmir and to groups like Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Historically speaking, though, the biggest revenue generator for the Taliban was their absolute dominance over the global opium and heroin business.

Conducting conventional agriculture in Afghanistan, like growing grains, vegetables or fruits, is very challenging because of the country's dry climate and the difficulty experienced in transporting fresh produce from the landlocked mountains to world markets in time before the produce is spoiled.

The opium poppy, however, is a drought resistant plant that grows well in dry climates, and

once it's harvested, it won't spoil on long journeys.

It's easy to store and transport, and most importantly, it sells for a lot of money.

Based on a 2007 ERA study from the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, a kilogram of dry opium could sell for approximately $125, which meant that a farmer in Afghanistan could make about 17 times more money by growing opium poppies at $4,622 per hectare than by growing wheat at only $266 per hectare.

And so thousands of Afghan farmers decided to grow opium instead and worked in league with the Taliban, who offered them protection and logistics in exchange for a share in the profits.

And they were outrageously successful at it.

By 2021, just before the Taliban returned back to power, more than 90% of the world's heroin Supply was coming from opium produced in Afghanistan.

While more than 95% of the heroin supply in the European market was coming from Afghanistan.

Opium was Afghanistan's leading export by a wide margin, and

it was valued at about $4 billion a year, split between Afghan farmers, warlords and the Taliban themselves, which bankrolled the Taliban's insurgency and the return to power in 2021.

But then, all of a sudden, in April of 2022, shortly after taking power, and

just as the opium harvesting season in the country was beginning, the Taliban banned the planning of opium and theoretically outlawed the opium trade in the process.

The move was carefully designed to make the Taliban appear more palatable to the outside world by cracking down on the drug trade, but

without actually cracking down on the drug trade.

You see, the ban on opium growing in 2022 wasn't going to affect the opium harvest in 2022.

The expectation that the next growing and harvesting season would be banned then sent opium prices skyrocketing in local markets and allowed enough time for the Taliban's producers and traffickers to pile up reserves to sell at the massively inflated prices.

Since that time, satellite images have confirmed that Afghanistan's opium poppy production is down dramatically, with Anchorage dedicated opium poppy production down by more than 95% in some areas of the country.

But as the Taliban continues to earn money by trickling out their strategic reserves of opium at much higher prices, they've also begun branching out into a new product of choice that will begin earning them even more money in the near future.

The plant that produces natural methamphetamine, ephedra, grows wild in Afghanistan naturally.

But natural ephedra is inefficient at producing methamphetamine when compared to chemically produced meth.

The production of one kilo of pure meth can be either manufactured by 200 kg of ephedra, plants that need to be harvested by humans who want to be paid, or by only 2kg of industrial grade chemical ephedrine that can be sourced from bulk smuggling of cold medicine.

The Taliban has also clamped down on the growing of ephedra plants, just like they did with opium poppies.

As the Taliban moves further towards the production of chemical meth in labs that are harder to spot.

Dotted across the country, chemically produced meth is also cheaper to produce than heroin is, and

the returns on selling it are much higher.

Which is why the Taliban's ban on growing opium is really just a diversification play.

As they shift towards the more lucrative meth market.

Near the beginning of this year, on 2 January, Iran reportedly seized a massive shipment of 171 kilograms, or 377 pounds of Afghan produced meth at their border.

And that's only a harbinger of things to come as the Taliban attempts to re anchor Afghanistan as the new center of the global meth business that the outside world will struggle to ever stop without another foreign intervention that nobody wants to do.

In fact, the Taliban's most infamous drug lord, Bashar Nurzai, was the man who so dominated the Taliban's heroin trade for years that he was nicknamed the Pablo Escobar of the Middle east and who was arrested by the United States in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison for heroin smuggling, was recently released by Washington in 2022 and traded back to the Taliban in exchange for an American prisoner who they had also captured.

Norzai's return to Afghanistan is likely a harbinger of the Taliban's desire to use his decades of smuggling expertise again with methamphetamine.

But Norzai has also been granted the control of several newly established mining companies in the country that seek to exploit Afghanistan's abundant mineral wealth too.

The US Geological Survey previously conducted a report in Afghanistan that estimated the country had at least $1 trillion worth of untapped and economically recoverable minerals and gemstones, including large quantities of resources like coal, copper, iron, lead, gold, chromite, lithium, zinc and a whole bunch of other materials.

But Afghanistan doesn't really have the finances, the equipment or the expertise to really exploit any of these resources on their own.

Which is why all of Norzai's mining companies have been established as joint ventures with Chinese companies instead, as China has been eyeing up Afghanistan ever since the US withdrew from the country, China is highly interested in incorporating Afghanistan into its Belt and Road Initiative, as the country sits precisely in between China and Europe.

And China is also, of course, interested in breaking into Afghanistan's huge and untapped mineral wealth, while the Taliban wants any international recognition they can get and any outside investment they can get.

And China is a potential partner nearby who doesn't really ask too many questions about the way the Taliban treats their own people.

Moreover, China is also very interested in a calm Afghanistan under the control of a single, strong and friendly power.

Because of Afghanistan's border with China's own restive Xinjiang province, home to the indigenous Muslim Uyghur people who have often resisted Chinese authority, and

where more than a million Uyghurs are currently estimated to have been rounded up by Chinese authorities and placed into internment camps.

China absolutely doesn't want a flow of weapons and extremists traveling from Afghanistan into Xinjiang.

And so the more stable and secure Afghanistan becomes, the better for China.

Unfortunately for Beijing, though, Afghanistan is still hardly anything but stable or secure.

In the three years since the Taliban seized power, they have worked extremely hard to consolidate all of their gains in the country.

But just like the last time the Taliban was in power back in the late 1990s, the fighting between Afghans themselves never really ended.

And there is another rival faction within the country that seeks to overthrow the Taliban and replace them with their own government.

You might be familiar with them already, isis, but

the exact flavor of ISIS operating within Afghanistan is different from the ISIS that used to operate in Iraq and Syria back in the 2010s that you might be most familiar with.

The ISIS faction in Afghanistan calls themselves the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS K for short.

They are the regional Central Asian branch of the greater ISIS movement, and

as such, they are ideologically fully committed to the cause of global jihad and carving out a worldwide caliphate that will encompass all of the world's Muslims beneath one flag and one leader.

ISIS K takes the K part of its name, Khorasan, in reference to the historical region of Khorasan in Central Asia that encompassed swathes of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and

Tajikistan, a region that ISIS K believes will be its own province to govern and rule within the greater worldwide Islamic State once it's been established.

ISIS K therefore wants to utilize the resources of Afghanistan and all of the weapons left behind by the Americans and the Soviets before them to wage a campaign of massive conquest across the territory of Khorasan that'll necessitate conquering Tajikistan and invading and conquering large parts of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and

The biggest thing standing in their way, however, is the Taliban, who are pragmatic enough to understand that waging a campaign of conquest this large in scale would almost certainly bring in another massive outside military intervention again, that would topple them from power again and destroy all of the gains and progress they've made since 2021.

The Taliban largely accomplished all of their objectives once they returned to power in Afghanistan, and