Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan's opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world's total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban's military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year."Opium is their financial engine," said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. "That is why we think he will fight for these areas."
The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents. But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group's hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.
No one here thinks that is going to be easy.
Only 10 minutes inside the tiny village of Zangabad, 20 miles southwest of Kandahar, a platoon of American soldiers stepped into a poppy field in full bloom on Monday. Taliban fighters opened fire from three sides.
"From the north!" one of the soldiers yelled, spinning and firing.
"West!" another screamed, turning and firing, too.
An hour passed and a thousand bullets whipped through the air. Ammunition was running low. The Taliban were circling.
Then the gunships arrived, swooping in, their bullet casings showering the ground beneath them, their rockets streaking and destroying. Behind a barrage of artillery, the soldiers shot their way out of Zangabad and moved into the cover of the vineyards.
"When are you going drop the bomb?" Capt. Chris Brawley said into his radio over the clatter of machine-gun fire. "I'm in a grape field."
The bomb came, and after a time the shooting stopped.
The firefight offered a preview of the Americans' summer in southern Afghanistan. By all accounts, it is going to be bloody.
Like the guerrillas they are, Taliban fighters often fade away when confronted by a conventional army. But in Afghanistan, as they did in Zangabad, the Taliban will probably stand and fight.
Among the ways the Taliban are believed to make money from the opium trade is by charging farmers for protection; if the Americans and British attack, the Taliban will be expected to make good on their side of that bargain.