The AfghanPunkZine in a heart wrenching social media post wrote:
The symbolism of bombing and killing men who are trying to heal from addiction. who are trying to rebuild their lives and find hope away from pain.
How is addiction created? Who brought these drugs into the country and build the economy for it? Who brought the pain into the country? Who brought in the hopelessness?
Who benefits from people staying in pain?
This is why I always say: Afghanistan is everything. And by everything, I mean it is both the macro and the micro of imperialism-from its soil to its beating heart to the way we hold our lovers, the way we hold ourselves. It teaches us everything: extraction of humans, nature, soil, animals.
They try to extract fragment by fragment, what it means to be human. But it’s pathetic because they expose the opposite-the essence of what a human truly is.
i think only of Afghans today because we all know that only Afghans know. Only Afghans know.
On the 16th of March 2026, a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul, Afghanistan was attacked by heavy airstrikes by the Pakistani air forces. The BBC called it as “the deadliest attack in Afghanistan, possibly ever, but certainly in recent history, including 20 years of war between the Taliban, and Nato and Afghan republic forces”. Although the number of deaths could be much higher, in the month of May, a UN report confirmed the death of 269 men, estimating further 122 injured. The strikes significantly damaged the 2000 bed hospital and its structure. The UN report details how the strikes first impacted the mosque and the sleeping areas of the hospitals and then other areas such as the food storage, sleeping quarters and vocational training areas. The irony is painfully stark here— to see a country such as Pakistan whose chief of army is known to be a hafiz-e-Quran (someone who has thoroughly read and memorised the Quran) carrying out these “precision strikes” on patients of Omid rehabilitation centre right after the Tarawih evening prayers during the holy nights of Ramzan. Targeting several patients who were going out of the Mosque during the nights which signify and embody patience, mercy, and compassion, a month where communities get together to worship and to reflect.
What makes it even more heartbreaking is those people who were targeted were the ones who were striving to heal, to recover and attempting to rebuild their broken lives. A faith that places such immense importance on mercy and the sanctity of human life, this contrast is impossible to ignore: the Pakistan chief of army, Asim Munir might have preserved the sacred verses in memory but the spirit of those teachings remain shattered in reality. While many fasting Muslims celebrated Eid across the world, wooden coffins lined up in the capital city of Afghanistan as grieving families searched for their loved ones.
The global headlines remain saturated on the escalating tensions between the United States, Iran and Israel, but many may not be aware that another conflict is unfolding —Pakistan has declared an open war against Afghanistan, accusing the latter of harbouring Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and who are suspected for carrying suicide bombings that took place in Pakistan not so long ago. The Taliban rejects these accusations. The TTP is said to be a byproduct of the U.S invasion of Afghanistan. Officially formed in 2007, the TTP claims to be an extension of the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Jihadists and Afghan militant forces fought together but the former turned against the Pakistani state after Islamabad took the decision to support Washington’s efforts towards counterterrorism. It is the largest militant organization in Pakistan and is designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization.
The two countries had declared and agreed to subsequently maintain a ceasefire during their meetings held in Doha and Istanbul. Since October 2025 cross border armed violence has resulted in the injury and loss of around 500 civilians. By the beginning of 2026 this cross border armed violence regained momentum, UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan) documents over 750 civilian deaths and injuries from 1st of January till the 31st of March 2026, most of these casualties were caused by airstrikes.The rising tensions has also led to mass expulsion campaigns by Pakistan starting in 2023 of Afghan refugees who had fled to the neighbouring country when the Taliban took power, more than one million Afghans were deported in 2025 alone. With regards to the attacks on the rehabilitation centre, Pakistan government and army officials have denied targeting civilian infrastructure, calling these “precision airstrikes” on military installations and terrorist support infrastructure inside eastern Nangarhar province and Kabul.
Pakistan’s feigning ignorance regarding the existence of Omid rehabilitation hospital is hard to digest especially when this drug rehabilitation facility has been publicly known and covered by well known international media houses such as AlJazeera and BBC. Claiming to target military bases and acting disingenuous regarding the location of the facility then becomes difficult to believe. This is also the reason why this destruction feels so disturbing, the usage of words like “precision” and “security” while turning a hospital into a battlefield where the medical facilities and innocent families continue to bear the consequences.
U.S military bases and rehab centres
After the Americans abandoned a U.S military training compound called camp Phoenix , the infrastructure was transformed into a rehabilitation centre and was called Omid meaning hope in Dari and Pashto. The Omid facility was about a kilometre away from the main UN offices, Fiona Frazer, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for the Human Rights in Afghanistan also notes how UN agencies were providing support to the patients of the hospital. This is not the first time a hospital was deliberately attacked in Afghanistan, the strike on Omid is resonant to that of the 2015 U.S strikes on the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors without Borders trauma centre located in Kunduz, norther Afghanistan that killed 42 people. The attacks took place regardless of the fact that MSF had provided the exact location and GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital both to the Afghan Ministry of Interior and Defence as well as the U.S department of Defence and U.S Army in Kabul. The U.S military eventually acknowledged and took responsibility for these attacks yet no one has faced any prosecution till date.
Apart from the Omid centre, another former US military Air Force base was attacked this year on the 1st of March in Bagram that served as one of the largest operating centre for the U.S military presence. The Taliban plans to transform these abandoned foreign ex military bases into special economic zones. The location of Bagram and statements given by the U.S president Donald Trump provides another angle to these attacks. The president has time and again expressed his demand to keep the Bagram Air Base due to its close proximity to China. He went so far to tweet on his social platform saying “If Afghanistan doesn’t give Bagram Airbase back to those that built it, the United States of America, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN!!!”. The Taliban has consequently rejected his demands.
The Birth of the Drug Kingdom
To understand why Afghanistan has reached to this point, it is important to remember what happened in history. Afghanistan was not always a drug kingdom. From 1979 till 1989 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, backing a left wing government also called as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In order to fight the Soviets the CIA formed U.S backed mujahideen under Operation Cyclone, a coalition between militant Islamic groups who opposed Soviet aligned regime. An article published in 2003 for the Time Magazine called “The Oily Americans” explains how these events set the stage for another U.S foreign policy shaped by oil interests.
The then Pro Soviet Government carried out raids and crop substitution programs systematically destroying farmlands and forcing rural populations to move towards urban centres so they could be controlled more easily. The Soviets damaged the country’s irrigation systems by 36% and the livestock in the country decreased to 70%. Enormous tracts of cultivable land were bombed and mined from 1979 till 1989, resulting in grave hardships on Afghans, in particular the rural population. Several families died or were displaced, and many were forced to migrate to neighbouring countries because of the Soviet Invasion and its occupation. These events considerably broke the country’s agricultural industry. The farmers then started to switch to opium cultivation which became much more profitable. Several Afghan mujahideen factions which were created to fight the Soviets began to encourage poppy cultivation later to be transformed to heroin. Drug trafficking soon became the prime source of funding for Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and mujahideen who received heavy funding from the U.S to fight the Soviets. During the 1980s and 1990s, Hekmatyar funded his militant operations mainly through illegal drug trade. Operation Cyclone was one of the most expensive covert action in history where CIA spend over 3 million dollars to arm and train the mujahideen. This aid provided to the “freedom fighters” during the 80s also helped in expanding the opium production in the country, linking Pakistan’s heroin laboratories to the global supply market. Poppy was grown and harvested in high numbers by peasants, guerrilla groups and criminal networks, however, it is important to note that not all mujahideen or tribal groups were involved in the production.
By the 1990s Afghanistan descended into continuous civil war. Warlords carved up territories, major livelihoods collapsed and poppy became a crop that generated significantly greater income for Afghan farmers that drove the rural economy. In 2000 the Taliban ended the civil war and took power, announcing a nation wide ban on poppy cultivation. The introduction of this ban contained various techniques to curb the cultivation such as destruction of poppy crops, local monitoring and public punishment. The result of the Taliban law enforcement against opium resulted in a 99% reduction and a net 65% reduction in global potential heroin production from the 2001 harvest. Many analysts consider this event as the most effective drug control enforcement in modern history. In 2001 after the U.S and British forces overthrew the Taliban and invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of counter terrorism, the almost eradicated poppy industry skyrocketed and expanded in the next decade. Even though the NATO backed Karzai government turned the cultivation and trafficking of opium illegal in 2002, most impoverished farmers chose to continue to cultivate the crop. Opium being drought resistant was not only easy to store but also easy to transport and did not require refrigeration. With Afghanistan’s limited infrastructure and broken irrigation, growing traditional crops became incredibly difficult for local farmers.
Senior associate Asia director of Human Rights Watch, Patricia Gossman, exclaimed “I have spent much of these past 20 years talking to Afghans about the consequences of counterterrorism gone wrong – the civilian deaths and injuries that never made it into the Pentagon’s airstrike death count; the night raids that turned into summary executions targeting people who had the bad luck to live in a contested district; the torture of people in custody that destroyed lives and motivated revenge”.
In 2008 an academic article estimated around 90% of world’s opium cultivation took place in Afghanistan, making the country world’s largest producer. In the 1980s and 1990s the United States experienced an epidemic of crack and heroin which then led to several anti-narcotics campaigns such as Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s famous televised speech given from the white house on “Just Say No” campaign.
U.S implemented a costly affair not just on counterterrorism but also on counternarcotics — spending 8.6 billion dollars between 2002 and 2017 causing the loss of lives and casualties of many Afghans, American troops and contractors.
So one might ask, even after such high expenditures why has the U.S counternarcotics failed so terribly?
Once the U.S forces entered the territory in 2001 after ousting the Taliban they went through a structural dilemma, in order to quickly establish a pro American government they partnered with local commanders also knows as strongmen and warlords, tribal elders and old powerbrokers, almost all of whom were deeply linked to the poppy economy and were on a U.S payroll. Seth Harp’s book called The Fort Bragg Cartel looks into the role of U.S invasions and how it stimulates drug productions, in particular, Afghanistan, that became the biggest narco state in the world. Simultaneously, the Taliban too started encouraging local farmers to produce opium in order to gain funds as well as allegiance. The Taliban returned to power in 2021, and that same year marked the fifth consecutive opium harvest reaching historic highs. The harvest totalled 6,000 tons, leading to 320 tons of pure heroin ready for trafficking to other parts of the world.
The importance of drug treatment hospitals in Afghanistan
When a country becomes one of the largest producers of opium, domestic consumption becomes an unavoidable consequence. Greater availability of illegal drugs inevitably increases the likelihood of local distribution and substance abuse, transforming this deadly production into a domestic social issue and public health issue. Afghan refugees who were living in Iran and Pakistan, including those internally displaced started consuming heroin, opium, hashish and other drugs which offered an escape from the tragic reality they were facing. Drug abuse was a coping mechanism against the immense suffering and loss inflicted on the Afghan people. The director of the Kabul mental health hospital Dr Abdul Ahad Award said that the leading forms of addiction were not only heroin and opium but also injection drugs, analgesic pain relievers, shoe polish, cannabis, prescription drugs and also glue.
According to UNDCP (United Nations International Drug Control Program), 40 percent of Afghan refugees who use drugs began their addiction in neighbouring countries such as Iran or Pakistan when they had fled the country. In the contemporary situation even if the the Taliban has implemented criminalisation on drug abuse, but due to unemployment, easy access, poverty, mental health crisis and pressures related to war trauma, the consumption has consequently increased. The UNODC in a 2021 report speaks of how the illicit drug economy has started to become more tangled as methaphetamine productions has increased in recent years. Global and regional demands for this drug, in addition to saturated markets for opiates, can push the illicit economies into further expansion.
The country is struggling with one of the most acute addiction crisis in the world, having the highest statistics of drug use globally. Around three million Afghans are grappling with drug addiction. A 2025 UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) called the situation as “a pressing but less understood dimension: the human toll of high-risk drug use across the country”. Since the Taliban took power in 2021, International donors have mostly withdrawn, impacting the number of operational treatment facilities which remain critically low. Afghanistan Analysts Network quoted a doctor active in the country for an article, the doctor who decided to remain anonymous explained how most rehabilitation centres were inside rented houses and right after the political developments, the new government did not manage to pay rent therefore causing the shutting down of these centres. He further added how only government run centres remain functioning that are 59 in total. Large camps are also found in the country inside regions such as Kandahar, Kabul and Herat.
To attack Omid hospital, one of the few remaining facilities of drug rehabilitation is not only about putting risk of lives of patients but also weakens and destroys remaining care structures which is a pressing need for a population that has suffered through decades of war and conflict.
In a satirical piece, Ghamzorai, Kandahar’s famous poet sings in Pashto:
“The American have come and will give us chocolate!
The Russian have come too and will give us chocolate!
Thank goodness! the tanks are here — and they’re bringing us chocolate!
These poor foreigners came to serve us.
Now Donald Trump is coming to throw us a party
The Americans have come and will give us chocolate!
May the almighty not drive these people away
I want meat — get rid of the Okra
Listen to this Ghamzorai song and laugh”
Source: Kuchi Films