Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs stated that it has tried to support over 10,000 children.
November 20 marks World Children’s Day, a global occasion dedicated to safeguarding children’s rights and securing a better future. However, in Afghanistan, many children still face harsh living conditions and are forced into hard labor.
Barakatullah, a child laborer, said: “I am the head of my household. I work and bring home bread. I wanted to become an engineer, but after my father passed away, I left school and now I’m forced to work for my family.”
Mohammad, another child laborer, shared: “I’m 12 years old and live in a family of ten. My father has a cart, and I shine shoes myself.”
On the occasion of World Children’s Day, UNICEF has warned that children in Afghanistan are facing a range of crises.
Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, said: “Today is the World Children’s Day, and I want to use this opportunity to acknowledge the resilience of the children in Afghanistan, who this year have had to live through a devastating earthquake, a massive returning crisis, but also struggling with the daily reality of drought, malnutrition, access to education, water, hygiene, and sanitation. For us as UNICEF, no child should live through this.”
Diedrah, Head of UNICEF’s Central Zone in Afghanistan, also emphasized: “Today, World Children’s Day, is a day for us to remember that we want children at the center of all of our plans and policies from the beginning to the end, so the children have a chance to thrive and be the best that they can be for the future of Afghanistan. Happy World Children’s Day.”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs stated that it has tried to support over 10,000 children.
Samiullah Ebrahimi, spokesperson for the ministry, said: “The Ministry has activated orphanages across all provinces to care for orphans. Currently, around 10,000 children are housed in these facilities.”
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in a message on World Children’s Day, once again stressed the importance of access to education for girls.
In a post on X, Karzai wrote that it is time for the gates of schools and universities to be opened to all girls in the country. According to him, education is the key to Afghanistan’s progress.
He stated: “Our children can only have a bright future, contribute to national development, and compete on the global stage if they are given the opportunity today to acquire knowledge, skills, and expertise.”
Abdul Nasir Rashtia, an economic analyst, said: “Children are the wealth and capital of a nation. In the future, they can be instrumental in rebuilding and advancing the country.”
On this World Children’s Day, families and social activists are once again calling on the international community to pay special attention to the condition of Afghan children — children who will shape the nation’s future, yet today, are among the most in need of support.
Afghan Children Face Dire Challenges on World Children’s Day
The border raids are the latest in a series amid escalating tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakistani security forces have killed 23 fighters in two separate raids near the Afghan border as tensions simmer between Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan and India.
Forces launched a “targeted operation” on Wednesday in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram District, the military said in a statement on social media, referring to the fighters as “khawarij”, the term it uses for banned groups, including the Pakistan Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The raid led to an “intense” exchange of fire, killing 12 people. No Pakistani military casualties were reported.
Forces then raided another location in the same “general area” and killed 11 more people, the military said.
The killings add to more than 30 that the military has reported throughout the week as it carried out raids largely in the same province, following an Islamabad suicide bombing on November 11 that killed at least 12 people and wounded 30 more.
Without providing evidence, Minister Shehbaz Sharif blamed India for the attack, while Pakistani Minister of Defence Khawaja Asif also implicated Afghanistan. Last week, Pakistan arrested four members of an Afghan cell it accused of taking part.
Pakistan has long alleged that fighter groups are backed by India and Afghanistan, a charge that New Delhi and Kabul deny. Afghanistan has blamed Islamabad for violating its sovereignty through military strikes.
Peace talks in Turkiye’s Istanbul between Afghanistan and Pakistan recently ended without resolution, but both sides maintain that a ceasefire, however fragile, still holds after an eruption of violence between the two.
The Pakistan Taliban has been emboldened since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 after the United States’s withdrawal.
In recent months, the Pakistan Taliban – which wants to overthrow the Pakistani government – has escalated its attacks, which surpassed a decade-old high in August, according to Islamabad-based think tank Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies.
In 2024, the number of incidents recorded surged to 856, up from 645 in 2023.
Pakistani forces kill 23 fighters in wave of Afghan border raids
These operations were carried out less than a week after a deadly suicide bombing outside Islamabad’s G-11 district court, killing at least 12 people and injuring over 30.
Pakistan security forces killed 30 militants in several operations near its border with Afghanistan in the last few days, AFP reported, quoting the Pakistan Army. Twenty-three militants were killed in raids in the Kurram district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday, and were related to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or its affiliated groups, the military said in a statement. It also accused India of supporting them in orchestrating strikes inside the country, a claim that New Delhi has rejected.
These operations were carried out less than a week after a deadly suicide bombing outside Islamabad’s G-11 district court, killing at least 12 people and injuring over 30.In a follow-up statement, the military said it killed seven militants in three separate operations in Mohmand, Lakki Marwat and Tank districts in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on November 18-19. “Pakistan will continue at full pace to wipe out the menace of foreign-sponsored and supported terrorism from the country,” the military stated.
Islamabad has repeatedly accused Afghanistan’s Taliban government of sheltering terrorists, particularly members of the TTP, who are blamed for numerous deadly attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul has denied the charges, insisting that Pakistan’s internal security is not Afghanistan’s responsibility.
The relation between Islamabad and Afghanistan took a steep downturn in recent times, and the dispute over the Durand Line results in periodic skirmishes between the two countries. Mass deportations of Afghan nationals, who were living in Pakistan for decades, also further strained relations.
The Istanbul peace talks, after deadly border clashes in October, which killed over 70 people on both sides, have ended without any agreement, with the sides trading blame for the breakdown in negotiations to restore tranquillity at the Durand line and uphold the fragile ceasefire.
Pakistan Army kills 30 militants near Afghan border days after Islamabad court blast
Afghan officials are lashing out against their former allies in the Pakistani military as hostilities between the two countries intensify.
The Afghan Taliban foreign minister arrived at the Islamic seminary to a rock star’s welcome. Students and teachers swarmed around his limo. Crowds of people streamed past me just to catch a glimpse of him.
But this was not in Afghanistan. The seminary he was visiting was in India, a country that had long kept its distance from the Taliban during their decades as an insurgency that New Delhi saw as a proxy for its archenemy, Pakistan.
During his first official visit to India last month, the Afghan foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, received the warmest welcome. He stood for photographs with officials in New Delhi after they promised to elevate India’s mission in Kabul to a full embassy for the first time in years. And I watched him openly beaming during his pilgrimage to the Deoband seminary in northern India, the spiritual source of the Taliban’s twinned creeds of conservative religion and holy war.
The whole visit seemed to be a message of defiance to Pakistan’s powerful military, once the benefactors of the Taliban’s insurgency in Afghanistan, but increasingly at odds with them now that the movement is in power in Kabul.
Through the years, Pakistan has taken any overture toward India as an inherently hostile act, and Mr. Muttaqi’s visit clearly crossed some line. Within hours of his arrival in India, Pakistan’s military was conducting airstrikes on the Afghan capital, an unprecedented escalation between the former allies that set off a wave of tit-for-tat violence and put both countries on a kind of war footing for a week.
Pakistani officials accuse Afghanistan’s rulers of supporting a resurgent Pakistani Taliban offensive by hosting and sheltering militants who have struck again and again at the security forces within Pakistan.
While Afghan officials deny that support, saying that the attacks within Pakistan are by internally inspired militants, they readily acknowledge a kinship with the Pakistani Taliban. Both groups are largely ethnic Pashtun, and both have common ties to the offshoots of the original Deoband seminary that Mr. Muttaqi visited.
The Deobandi schools in Pakistan cropped up after India’s partition in 1947 and later, with the aid of C.I.A. and Saudi money pumped into the region to defeat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, helped fuel the jihadi creed that became the Afghan Taliban.
Now, the legacy of that ideology, which repeatedly rallied neighbors to fight invaders, has grown increasingly messy and is dividing the former allies.
That Pakistan would now be facing its own persistent jihadi militancy problem after the Afghan Taliban’s victory over the U.S.-backed Afghan government in 2021 is a result predicted by many analysts — and long feared within Pakistan itself. But the sheer speed of degeneration of relations between the neighbors has surprised many.
“They created their own Frankenstein, and they thought they could control them,” said David B. Edwards, a professor of anthropology at Williams College who has chronicled the rise of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was referring to Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, which initially supported the Taliban insurgency.
Mr. Edwards said the clash between the two governments is a reminder of a more fundamental territorial dispute that had been pushed to the background during decades of conflict in Afghanistan, but never gone away: The Afghan side never fully accepted the 19th-century boundary drawn by the British that split the Pashtun tribes between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan.
In the wake of recent military escalation, leaders of the Taliban government have resorted to rhetoric showing that cross-border Pashtun nationalism has not been tempered by decades of support and ideological injection from Pakistan.
The Taliban’s deputy interior minister, Mohammad Nabi Omari, who spent a decade in U.S. detention at Guantánamo Bay, has ridiculed Pakistan’s prime minister as a puppet of President Trump. And he used a pejorative term for Pakistani soldiers killed by Taliban fire that the Taliban in the past would use to describe American soldiers or security forces of the Afghan republic.
“God is creating a pretext for that old territory of Afghanistan that is left with them, on that side of a theoretical boundary, to be returned to us,” he told a public gathering in Afghanistan last month.
The red carpet welcome in India for the Taliban foreign minister, who required an exemption from U.N. sanctions to be able to travel, in the middle of the escalation suggested that India was hoping to exploit the tensions. And Afghan officials are publicly demonstrating that they reject any dependence on Pakistan, even religiously or ideologically.
The 135-year-old Deoband seminary that Mr. Muttaqi visited was an important wellspring of conservative Islam for visiting Afghan scholars before its post-independence offshoots in Pakistan took precedence in recent decades. The school emphasized fundamentalist religious teachings over modern sciences, and its followers played an active role in the Indian independence movement against British colonialism.
Last month, leaders of the seminary beamed in pride at reconnecting with Afghan rulers who look up to their ideology. They refused to discuss some of the harshest measures of the Taliban government, including banning girls’ education beyond sixth grade, in the name of that ideology.
“Deoband is like the mother of our knowledge,” Mr. Muttaqi told a large gathering of students and teachers in one hall.
Opinion in Pakistani religious circles has been divided over Mr. Muttaqi’s trip to India. Leaders of the Haqqania madrasa in Pakistan, where he is an alumnus, described the red carpet welcome “of our proud son” as a celebration of the victory of “a long chain of jihadi sacrifice.”
Others, like the Peshawar-based religious scholar Tayyab Qureshi, saw it an expression of ungrateful Taliban seeking new patrons.
“Muttaqi, who learned his religious scholarship and even his Urdu language here in Pakistan, not in Deoband, needs to remember the sacrifices Pakistan paid in their support,” Mr. Qureshi said. “New Delhi is tactfully leveraging the friction between Islamabad and Kabul to advance its own agenda.”
Administrators at seminaries in Pakistan said that Afghan enrollment has dwindled over the past three years, after the Taliban administration set up hundreds of new seminaries of its own across Afghanistan, and Pakistan pushed Afghan refugees back in large numbers.
Now, a month after Mr. Muttaqi’s visit, Afghanistan and Pakistan are still seething at each other. And tensions have risen again between India and Pakistan after deadly bombings a day apart in each capital last week. Some analysts fear that a cycle of blame could bring those nuclear-armed neighbors back toward hostilities just a few months after the cease-fire that halted their alarming four-day military conflict.
In Afghanistan, leaders continue their defiant talk against Pakistan. They make little secret that their ties with the Pakistani Taliban, including their shared bond of conservative ideology, trumps any gratitude to Pakistan’s establishment for its past help.
In his public address last month, Mr. Omari, the Afghan deputy interior minister, warned Pakistan against any further military action. And he flexed the Taliban’s asymmetrical victory against American military might, wondering aloud whether Pakistan might be next.
“You may have airplanes and tanks, but we have the kind of fighters who are sitting here itching for when jihad will begin again,” he said. “Because, when you are addicted to, say, chewing tobacco — excuse my language — you can’t quit so easily.
“Our fighters are used to these wars over the past 20-25 years,” he said, “and they are wishing for another war to be rewarded with martyrdom.”
Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan and Hari Kumar from the Deoband Islamic seminary.
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 18, 2025, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Alliance Unravels Between Afghan Taliban and Pakistan’s Military
At a Shared Symbol of Jihad, the Taliban Defy Their Old Ties With Pakistan
Britain’s special envoy warned that 15 million people in Afghanistan face food insecurity, urging immediate international action to prevent worsening hunger and widespread malnutrition.
Britain’s special envoy to Afghanistan has warned that 15 million people in the country are experiencing food shortages, calling for immediate and coordinated international action.
Richard Lindsay wrote on X on Thursday, that he discussed Afghanistan’s food security with key partners during a meeting with Hamish Falconer, Britain’s deputy foreign minister.
The UK has long collaborated with the World Food Programme (WFP) to address food insecurity in Afghanistan, recently pledging £40 million to provide emergency food assistance.
According to UN data, roughly 23 million people under Taliban control require humanitarian aid, highlighting the scale of the crisis affecting vulnerable populations across the country.
The WFP has previously warned that Afghanistan is facing one of the world’s worst hunger crises, with one in five Afghans currently struggling with malnutrition.
International aid organizations say urgent support is needed to prevent further deterioration, estimating that $555 million is required to assist the most vulnerable Afghan families.
Experts note that prolonged economic challenges, droughts, and political instability have exacerbated food insecurity, making immediate humanitarian intervention critical to avert widespread malnutrition and potential famine.
UK Urges Collective Action as 15 Million People in Afghanistan Face Food Insecurity
Australian media have reported that the country will not extend the diplomatic credentials of the Afghan ambassador in Canberra, the capital of Australia.
According to these reports, the Australian federal government informed Wahidullah Waissi, the ambassador appointed by the former Afghan government, in a letter in late September of this year that he will no longer hold diplomatic status in the country as of February 2026.
An excerpt from Australian media: “Wahidullah Waissi, the ambassador appointed by Afghanistan’s former government in August 2021, received a letter in late September effectively warning him that as of February he will no longer have diplomatic status.”
Fazlmanullah Mumtaz, a political analyst, commented: “Consular and diplomatic relations are established out of necessity. When those needs no longer exist, maintaining consulates without providing services becomes pointless.”
Meanwhile, Ahmad Javed Mujadidi, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has also announced the end of his mission in the kingdom.
Some political analysts consider the Islamic Emirate’s relations with Saudi Arabia to be good and believe that the embassy in Riyadh is likely to be handed over to a representative of the Islamic Emirate. However, they express a different view regarding the embassy in Australia.
Enayatullah Hemam, a political affairs expert, stated: “The Saudis and Australians may choose to elevate existing relationships, currently defined through informal or official contacts and transfer their embassies to the Islamic Emirate, as some other countries have done.”
Wahid Faqiri, an international relations expert, said: “If Australia wishes to maintain any kind of relations with Afghanistan official or semi-official, it will be compelled to engage with the Taliban. This also indicates that Australia recognizes the former Afghan government as part of history.”
These developments come at a time when ambassadors appointed by the former Afghan government are concluding their missions. Recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan declared several Afghan diplomatic missions, including the embassy in Australia, as invalid due to their refusal to cooperate with the Islamic Emirate’s foreign ministry.
Australia to End the Diplomatic Status of Afghan Envoy
The men arrested are linked to a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, who claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Pakistan has arrested four members of an Afghan cell over their alleged involvement in a deadly suicide bombing in its capital Islamabad earlier this week, as tensions heighten further between the neighbouring foes.
Tuesday’s attack outside a district court was claimed by a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Those arrested in connection with the bombing, which killed 12 people and wounded dozens, were linked to the Pakistan Taliban, according to Islamabad.
“The network was handled and guided at every step by the … high command based in Afghanistan,” a Pakistani government statement said on Friday, adding that the cell’s alleged commander and three other members were in custody.
“Investigations are continuing, and more revelations and arrests are expected,” it said, identifying the bomber as Usman alias Qari, a resident of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told the Senate on Thursday that the bomber was Afghan.
Another one of the suspects, Sajid Ullah, told investigators that Saeed-ur-Rehman, a Pakistan Taliban commander, ordered the attack in Islamabad through the Telegram messaging app.
The commander, also known as Daadullah, sent Ullah photographs of the suicide bomber, an Afghanistan citizen, with orders to receive him after he crossed the border into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he was a resident of Nangarhar province, the government said.
Daadullah, originally from Pakistan’s Bajaur region, is part of the Pakistan Taliban’s intelligence wing and currently hiding in Afghanistan, the government said.
The men were detained in a joint operation by the nation’s Intelligence Bureau and Counter-Terrorism Department, said the government, which did not detail where the arrests were made.
Islamabad has largely been spared from violence by armed groups in recent years, with the last suicide attack occurring in December 2022.
But the country is facing a resurgence of violence, which officials attribute mainly to armed groups allegedly sheltered on Afghan soil.
Naqvi on Monday claimed that Afghan nationals also took part in an assault this week on Cadet College Wana, a military-linked school in northwest Pakistan. Gunmen stormed the college and began a gun battle that lasted nearly 20 hours. Three soldiers and all the attackers were killed.
The Taliban government has not commented on Pakistan’s allegations, but has expressed “deep sorrow & condemnation” over both attacks.
Pakistan Taliban representatives did not comment on the arrests.
The accusations come amid a sharp deterioration in ties between Islamabad and Kabul, with recent attacks prompting the worst cross-border clashes in years last month.
More than 70 people were killed, including dozens of Afghan civilians, according to the United Nations.
The two countries agreed to a fragile ceasefire, but failed to finalise its details during several rounds of negotiations. Each side blamed the other for the impasse.
Addressing parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described the Islamabad bombing as a “horrific act of terrorism”.
“We want peace. We want Afghanistan to agree and be a partner in peace. We believe what’s good for Pakistan is good for them … but we cannot believe lies and not rein in terrorists,” he added.
Pakistan arrests 4 from an Afghan cell over deadly Islamabad bombing
Nine in 10 Afghan families skip meals, take on debt: UNDP
4.5 million returnees since 2023 strain collapsing economy
Women’s workforce share falls to 6%
UNDP warns of worsening hunger, migration
KARACHI, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Afghanistan’s economic recovery is buckling as nine in 10 households are forced to skip meals, sell belongings or take on debt to survive, the United Nations said on Wednesday, warning that mass returns are exacerbating the country’s worst crisis since the Taliban returned to power.
A United Nations Development Programme report said nearly one in 10 overseas Afghans has been forced back home, with more than 4.5 million returnees since 2023, mainly from Iran and Pakistan, swelling the population by 10%. On top of that, earthquakes, floods and drought have destroyed 8,000 homes and strained public services “beyond their limits.”
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QUAKES, FLOODS AND HUNGER
A survey of more than 48,000 households found that more than half of Afghanistan’s returnees have skipped medical care to buy food and 45% rely on open springs or unprotected wells for water.
Nearly 90% of returning Afghan families are in debt, owing $373 to $900, up to five times the average monthly income of $100 and nearly half of annual per-capita gross domestic product, the UNDP said.
In areas with high numbers of returnees, one teacher serves 70 to 100 students, 30% of children work and joblessness among returnees reaches 95%. The average monthly income is 6,623 Afghanis ($99.76), while rents have tripled.
The UNDP warned that without urgent support to strengthen livelihoods and services in high-return areas, overlapping crises of poverty, exclusion and migration will deepen.
It said sustaining aid is critical as donor pledges have plunged since 2021, covering only a fraction of the $3.1 billion that the UN sought for Afghanistan this year.
The Taliban government appealed for international humanitarian assistance after a deadly quake struck eastern Afghanistan in September and it has formally protested Pakistan’s mass expulsion of Afghan nationals, saying it is “deeply concerned” about their treatment.
The Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and a government spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
WOMEN BEAR THE BRUNT
Participation by women in Afghanistan’s labour force has fallen to 6%, one of the lowest globally, and restrictions on movement have made it nearly impossible for women who head households to access jobs, education or healthcare.Kanni Wignaraja, UN assistant secretary-general and UNDP regional director for Asia and the Pacific, said, “In some provinces one in four households depend on women as the main breadwinner, so when women are prevented from working, families, communities, the country lose out.”
Households headed by women, accounting for as many as 26% of returnee families in some districts, face the highest risk of food insecurity and secondary displacement.
The UNDP urged Taliban authorities to allocate more resources and called on donors to lift restrictions on female aid staff.
“Cutting women out of frontline aid work means cutting off vital services for those who need them most,” Wignaraja said.
($1 = 66.3900 afghanis)
Reporting by Ariba Shahid in Karachi; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus
Afghanistan economic recovery buckles as nine in 10 families go hungry or into debt, UNDP says
In a decade-long covert operation, the U.S. spy agency dropped modified poppy seeds in an attempt to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s billion-dollar opium crop.
In 20 years of grinding war in Afghanistan, the United States dropped a multitude of weapons from the skies: Millions of tons of ordnance. Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones. Even the “Mother of All Bombs,” the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in existence. And, amid the more conventional projectiles, tiny poppy seeds. By the billions.
On and off for over a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an audacious highly classified program to covertly manipulate Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop, blanketing Afghan farmers’ fields with specially modified seeds that germinated plants containing almost none of the chemicals that are refined into heroin, The Washington Post has learned.
The covert program, which has not previously been disclosed, is an unreported chapter in the 2001-2021 U.S. war in Afghanistan and in the long checkered history of American efforts to combat narcotics globally, from Latin America to Asia. Its existence was confirmed by 14 people familiar with aspects of the secret operation,all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a classified project.
The program’s disclosure comes as the war on narcotics is again dominating the security agenda.
President Donald Trump has declared war on drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere, orderingmore than a dozen lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, designating cartels as terrorist groups, and moving a vast naval and air force to the region. He has also authorized the CIA to take aggressive covert action against drug traffickers and their supporters.
This latest effort, like the fight against opium in Afghanistan two decades ago, faces uncertain success, according to former officials who participated in drug wars of the past.
In Afghanistan in the early 2000s, the burgeoning opium trade was thwarting U.S. goals, as American troops engaged in a deadly struggle to defeat the Taliban, eliminate terrorist groups and stabilize the weak Western-backed government. Afghan heroin fueled corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government and in the provinces. It helped pay for the Taliban’s weapons and equipment. And it accounted for the majority of global heroin supplies, with most of the drugs bound for Europe or the former Soviet Union.
Western allies and U.S. government agencies argued bitterly over which strategies would dent the crop without undermining rural Afghan support for Karzai.Diplomats and drug enforcement officials debated everything from aerial herbicide spraying to purchasing the entire Afghan crop and sending it overseas to be processed into medicine.
Unbeknownst to almost all of them, the CIA was operating its own secret heroin-eradicationprogram, run by the spy agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center,which was flush with funds during the Afghan war. The airdrops of modified poppy seeds began in the autumn of 2004, three people familiar with the program said. The operation was paused at least once and ended about 2015, those familiar with it said.
Clandestine operators, initially using British C-130 aircraft, made nighttime flights to avoid detection, dispersing billionsof the specially developed seeds over swaths of Afghanistan’s extensive poppy fields, people knowledgeable about the program said. The airdrops took place over the Afghan provinces of Nangahar and Helmand, centers of poppy cultivation, they said.
As far as is known, the seeds were not genetically engineered with gene editing — a technology not widely available until more recently — but grown and selected over time to produce a plant that harbored less of the alkaloid chemicals used to produce heroin. Details of when and how the seeds were developed remain unclear. But one person said the cultivation took several years and involved crossbreeding them with natural poppy seeds.
Once the seeds were dropped,the goal was for the plants sprouting from them to cross-fertilize with native plants and become the dominant strain over time, degrading the overall crop’s potency.
Many aspects of the program remain classified, including its budget, how many flights took place and hard metrics on its efficacy. It was so closely held that some senior Pentagon and State Department officials involved in Afghan policy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama said they were unaware of it or had only heard rumors.
The CIA required a classified written authorization, known as a “finding,” from Bush to conduct the flights and other aspects of the operation, which fell under the spy agency’s covert action powers, two former U.S. officials said. The finding made the program legal, at least as far as the U.S. government was concerned.
A CIA spokesperson declined to comment after the agency was given a list of specifics The Post planned to report. Former spokespeople for the Bush and Obama administrations also declined to comment.
The Afghan government led by Karzai was not informed when the CIA began the program, people familiar said.
It remains unclear whether the Afghans found out later. Karzai did not respond to a request for comment made through an aide.
The British Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
In a decade-long covert operation, the U.S. spy agency dropped modified poppy seeds in an attempt to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s billion-dollar opium crop.
Antonio Maria Costa, who led the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime from 2002 to 2010, said he heard whispers about a program like the one the CIA conducted but never had any confirmation.
As the program in Afghanistan was coming to an end in about 2015, U.S. officials discussed using the same unorthodox method against opium poppy fields in Mexico, another major heroin producer, two people familiar with the program said.
That plan was ultimately dismissed because poppies in Mexico are grown in small plots in hilly terrain, making them a much tougher target for aerial seeding than the flatlands of southwest Afghanistan, where the bulk of that country’s poppy crop was grown, one of the people said.
‘Out-of-the-box thinking’
The overall counternarcotics campaign in Afghanistan was an abysmal failure, Western officials acknowledge. It was doomed by interagency bickering in Washington; U.S. friction with allies including Britain, which led the international effort; intermittent support from Karzai and his government; andthe entrenchment of poppy farming in rural Afghanistan’s culture and economy.
The Pentagon repeatedly resisted deeper involvement in the Afghan drug war, arguing it distracted from its mission of eliminating Islamist terrorists and fighting the Taliban.
Several former CIA and State Department officials, however, said the spy agency’s seeding program to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s poppy crop was successful for a time. It was also tremendously expensive, chewing up the CIA Crime and Narcotics Center’s operational budget.
The budget of the CIA unit, which under Trump’s second administration has merged with the agency’s Western Hemisphere center, is classified.
“There was a sense that it worked. But maybe over time, it worked less well. That the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” said a former U.S. official who read reports on the program. “This is actually an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way.”
Others aware of the program were less impressed by the results, saying it made no lasting dent in Afghan opium production and helped Bush administration policymakers avoid tough decisions in the war on Afghanistan’s drugs.
A 2018 report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded: “No counter-drug program undertaken by the United States, its coalition partners, or the Afghan government resulted in lasting reductions in poppy cultivation or opium production.” SIGAR was not privy to the covert CIA operation.
Beginning in 2001, the United States spent about $9 billion to try to stem the tide of heroin flowing out of Afghanistan.Afghanistan’s poppy crop declined notably from 2007 to 2011, before rising again and skyrocketing after 2016, the SIGAR report said, citing U.N. and CIA data. The Taliban profited off the heroin pipeline for years, although U.S. officials clashed over how central it was to their finances.
The war over spraying
The United States has spent decades fighting illegal narcotics globally, interdicting shipments, penetrating trafficking networks, extraditing drug lords. Trump has deemed the problem a national security threat on par with international terrorism, and he has authorized the use ofmilitary force to allow strikes on alleged traffickers at sea that many former officials and legal experts say violate international law. He has used economic power, too, suggesting he would lower tariffs on China if it curbs the export of precursor chemicals used to make the deadly syntheticdrug fentanyl.
With plants grown for their narcotics, Washington has tried multiple approaches. In Colombia, U.S. funds paid for widespread aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate over plantations of coca, used to make cocaine. U.S. officials claimed the program was successful in reducing the crop. In Peru, American drug-control agencies tested a pellet containing herbicide, but it was never dropped, a former U.S. official said.
In Afghanistan,the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement bureau argued for aggressive aerial spraying of herbicide based on the Colombia model.osed spraying, arguing it would hurt efforts to win over the Afghan population from the Taliban. So did top Afghan officials, who said the chemicals could poison the groundwater in their heavily agricultural society.
U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, previously ambassador to Colombia, was so adamant about the spraying that he offered to sit, clad in a Speedo bathing suit, in a vat of glyphosate in Kabul’s Massoud Circle to prove its safety, three former senior officials said. Wood became known as “Chemical Bill.”
“I’m a spraying guy,” Bush told Karzai in one video teleconference, a former senior Bush administration official recalled. “Not in Afghanistan you’re not,” the Afghan president shot back.
U.S. officials were so confident the Afghan government would eventually approve the herbicide plan that they moved glyphosate and equipment for ground-based spraying into Kabul, the SIGAR report said. But the Afghan cabinet rejected the idea in January 2007. No significant herbicide spraying of Afghan poppies ever took place, according to multiple former U.S. officials.
As the deadlock over spraying stretched on, the Bush administration explored more unconventional control strategies.
“They were constantly looking for some sort of silver bullet,” said former journalist Gretchen Peters, who wrote a 2009 book on ties between the Taliban and drug traffickers.
Some proposals were exotic. State Department officials debated using mycotoxins, poisons produced by fungi, two former officials said. Beginning in 1998, the United Nations and the United States had funded research at a former Soviet laboratory in Uzbekistan on a fungus that infects and kills opium poppy plants.
But there was a problem: The poisons might inadvertently kill not only poppies but also Afghan food crops, leading to starvation.
“We could not use a pathogen that was not safe. That’s biological warfare,” said John Walters, Bush’s director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Walters, now president of the Hudson Institute, declined tocomment on the CIA poppy seed program.
A grim harvest
The covert CIA program went forward even as the debate over herbicide spraying raged, with airdrops beginning in 2004. It involved careful timing and elaborate orchestration, and it was preceded by years of secret agricultural research. The seeds had been grown at a site in the United States, crossed with normal poppy plants to test the outcome, and then produced in mass quantities, one person said.
The seeds had to be dropped in late autumn, when Afghan farmers were planting their own seeds. You had to “take care to make sure it didn’t stand out too much,” so that an Afghan poppy farmer would notice nothing amiss, but also “to ensure over time it did become the dominant crop,” or strain of poppy plant, said a former senior U.S. official familiar with the program’s beginnings.
The American plants not only contained virtually no morphine, but they were bred to sprout early and produce especially vivacious red flowers, making them attractive to Afghan farmers who, the CIA hoped, would harvest and replant their seeds.
There was also a hope, several officials said, that the farmers would keep and sell some of the seeds, propagating them through the country’s brisk agricultural markets.
Areas subjected to airdrops were targeted again in subsequent years with the aim of making the modified plants the dominant strain of opium poppy, the former senior U.S. official said.
The program’s progress was assessed in multiple ways, two people familiar said. Aerial surveillance and satellite imagery showed farmers ridding their fields of unproductive plants. Electronic eavesdropping picked up conversations among opium growers. There were even occasionalon-the-ground checks at farmers’ fields, with U.S. officials disguising the true purpose of their visit.
The CIA operation continued after Obama took office in 2009, and it was discussed at White House meetings of the Deputies Committee, a group of high-level national security officials from across government.
The program, which had always been expensive, ended because of money woes, numerous people said.
The CIA counternarcotics center’s budget was being squeezed, and the spy agency tried to convince other agencies — the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department — to fund the poppy seed drops.
In its final years, the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement bureau picked up the cost of aircraft fuel, maintenance and repair, but it never conducted airdrops, those familiar with the program said.
For nearly two decades, there had been persistent rumors among Afghan farmers that foreigners had fouled their poppy crop, either by covertly spraying it, adulterating the fertilizer they used or deliberately spreading disease. Those rumors, it turned out, werenot entirely unfounded.
When the U.S. military — and the CIA — finally withdrew from Afghanistan in chaotic fashion in 2021, the opium trade represented between 9 and 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, or between $1.8 billion and $2.7 billion, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
After regaining control of the country, the Taliban banned opium production. By 2023, cultivation had plummeted by 95 percent. But the crop rebounded last year by 19 percent, the U.N. said, and shifted to the country’s northeast, away from the traditional poppy growing areas once targeted by the CIA.
Inside the CIA’s secret mission to sabotage Afghanistan’s opium
An attack on a courthouse in Islamabad was the first major assault to hit Islamabad in more than a decade.
At least 12 people were killed and 27 others wounded on Tuesday in an attack on Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, according to officials. It was the first major attack to hit the city in more than a decade and comes as Pakistan is facing a resurgence of assaults by several insurgencies.
An attacker detonated a bomb near the entrance of a courthouse around lunchtime, according to the Pakistani interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the attacker had tried but failed to enter the court complex, with hundreds of lawyers, defendants and judges inside. The attacker died at the scene, the authorities said.
The attack has raised alarm that insurgent violence, confined in recent years to Pakistan’s western regions, has reached its urban centers. Islamabad, a quiet, leafy city of a million people, is the seat of political power and home to embassies and the headquarters of many international organizations.
The Pakistani defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said Pakistan was “in a state of war.”
“Anyone who thinks that the Pakistan Army is fighting this war in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and the remote areas of Balochistan should take today’s suicide attack at the Islamabad district courts as a wake-up call: This is a war for all of Pakistan,” Mr. Asif said on social media.
Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute in Washington, called the attack “deeply ominous.”
“Bomb blasts have moved from the frontier back into Pakistan’s cities,” he said in a text message. “With its guarded checkpoints into the city and proximity to army headquarters, Islamabad is the ultimate litmus test. If Islamabad isn’t safe, nowhere is.”
A group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to The Khorasan Diary, a digital platform in Islamabad that monitors militant activity in the region. Through a spokesman, the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or T.T.P., denied any connection to the blast.
A similar situation occurred in 2023 when a suicide bombing killed more than 100 people, mostly police officers, at a mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar. A group linked to the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but the T.T.P. distanced itself, saying it avoided targeting civilians.
Without providing evidence, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan accused India in a social media post of having instigated Tuesday’s courthouse attack and Afghanistan of harboring the attackers
In a statement, a spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, Randhir Jaiswal, rejected that claim. “India unequivocally rejects the baseless and unfounded allegations,” he said.
The last major attack in Islamabad attributed to the Pakistani Taliban occurred in 2014, when militants killed 11 people in an assault on another courthouse.
Tuesday’s courthouse attack was the second in less than two days in Pakistan.
Khalid Mandokhel, a lawyer who was in the court’s cafeteria at the time, said that the blast was so strong that it threw him off his chair.
“There was smoke everywhere and complete chaos afterward,” he said. “If it had happened inside the courtroom, the number of casualties could have been much higher.”
By Tuesday evening, Pakistani soldiers had been fighting for more than a day against militants they said belonged to the T.T.P. and who stormed a military college in the country’s west on Monday. More than 350 people had been evacuated from the site but 300 others were still stranded, according to the Pakistani army.
The T.T.P. also denied being behind that attack.
Attacks by the Pakistani Taliban have been at the center of tensions between Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, which have escalated to cross-border military clashes and Pakistani airstrikes on Afghanistan’s capital and its second-largest city in recent weeks.
The Pakistani government has accused the Taliban administration in Afghanistan of funding and providing a safe haven for the Pakistani Taliban’s leaders and militants, who then conduct attacks on the other side of the border.
The Afghan Taliban, in power since 2021, have denied backing the Pakistani Taliban and say the two entities are officially distinct. Still, the groups share longstanding and deep ties. They fought together against Pakistani and NATO forces in Afghanistan and its border areas before the Taliban came back to power.
Recent talks mediated by the United Arab Emirates and Turkey collapsed after Pakistan accused Afghanistan of refusing to commit to stop backing the Pakistani Taliban.
“Pakistan’s expectation was that with passage of time, Taliban regime would be able to control these attacks and take concrete actions against the T.T.P. elements present on Afghan soil,” Pakistan’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday after the latest rounds of talks collapsed.
“The response from the Taliban regime has only been hollow promises and inaction,” it added.
Through a spokesman, Afghanistan condemned the attacks in Islamabad and on the military college.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan ‘in a State of War’ After Explosion Kills 12 in Capital
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign