BY THE HILL STAFF

An oasis stretched far into the desert, a vast sea of emerald stalks and scarlet poppy flowers that grew to the horizon.

The Taliban operated openly, running a social experiment unlike anything in the country. Tens — then hundreds — of thousands of people flocked here to escape the war and grow poppy, fleeing the American efforts to wipe out the crop.

The Taliban opened a trauma hospital to treat their wounded and earned a fortune, not just from opium, but also from methamphetamines and taxes on goods moving in and out of Afghanistan, bringing them millions upon millions of dollars every month.

During the war, this remote district became a laboratory for a future Taliban state, providing money for the war and a sanctuary for the men fighting it.

The same insurgents who embraced opium to help finance their war have put an end to it, ordering a ban that has all but cleared Afghanistan of poppy and other illicit drugs.

What the United States and its allies failed to do in two decades of war, the Taliban has managed in two years of peace. In an area where poppy once dominated the landscape, barely a stalk remains.

Hundreds of labs set up to process heroin and methamphetamines have been closed or destroyed. The drug bazaar that powered this part of southern Afghanistan has been all but emptied. And the nation, already reeling without international aid, has lost a sizable piece of its economy as a result.

On top of that, the Taliban government has stiffened its taxes, leaving residents bitter and angry. Many have moved away, except those too poor or invested to leave, like Abdul Khaliq.

“This is all coming to an end,” he said, waving his hand toward the emptying villages.

There was almost nothing in this district, Bakwa, when he arrived 25 years ago, just an empty desert plain. He built an empire out of sand, selling the pumps and solar panels that provided water for the opium boom, helping turn Bakwa into a frontier outpost for smugglers, traders and farmers.

Now his story, like Bakwa’s, has come full circle: the foreigners gone, the Taliban back in power, the earth stripped of poppy and the land returning to dust.

“It’s a matter of time,” he said.

The war in Afghanistan was many things: a mission to eliminate Al Qaeda and oust the group that gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden; an ambitious drive to build a new Afghanistan, where Western ideals ran headlong into local traditions; a seemingly endless entanglement, where winning sometimes mattered less than not losing.

It was also a drug war.

The Americans and their allies tried again and again to sever the Taliban’s income and stop one of the world’s worst scourges: opium and heroin production.

The United States spent nearly $9 billion on heavy-handed eradication and interdiction, yet Afghanistan eclipsed its own records as the largest producer of illicit poppy in the world.

What did change was where that poppy was grown. Little by little, farmers flooded once empty deserts in southwestern Afghanistan, barren pockets of sand with almost no populations to speak of before.

Communities formed in starburst patterns along ancient irrigation lines, then moved farther into the desert to farm as they pleased. The Taliban followed, finding sanctuary in the utter remoteness of districts like Bakwa and their unnavigable roads.

At its height, the Taliban oversaw a narco-state here, a farm-to-table drug operation with hundreds of field labs processing opium into heroin and wild ephedra into methamphetamines for Europe, Asia and elsewhere. By the end of the war, Bakwa had become an entrepôt of the drug trade, home to the largest open-air drug market in the country.

The Taliban showed flexibility, too, both morally and financially. Despite banning poppy on religious grounds before the American invasion, the Taliban allowed farmers to grow as much of it as they wanted during the war.

And they taxed it loosely, often whatever farmers could afford, adopting a hearts-and-minds strategy. They also taxed smugglers, who were happy to help fund a Taliban war machine that didn’t interfere with business.

Bakwa soon became an incubator for governance. Taliban courts adjudicated all manner of disputes, while millions of dollars flowed monthly to help finance the Taliban mission beyond Bakwa and the southwest.

Western officials took aim at that money. They began with eradication, then tried persuading farmers to grow legal crops, and ended with fighter jets bombing makeshift labs made of mud.

“At least $200 million of this opium industry goes into the Taliban’s bank accounts,” Gen. John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2017, a year of peak poppy production, said at the time. “And this fuels — really pays for the insurgency.”

“The money from agriculture, poppy included, funded the war” in these regions, said Haji Maulavi Asif, now the Taliban’s governor for Bakwa District. “But the money from the customs operation helped fund the entire movement.”

Now that poppy has been banned, the farmers the Taliban once relied on feel betrayed, while the Taliban is trying to govern without the money it brings.

“While economically, the decision to ban poppy costs a lot, politically it makes sense,” said Mr. Asif. “We are silencing the countries of the world who say we are growing poppy and participating in the global drug trade.”

‘Desert people’ to opium entrepreneurs

When the war started in 2001, Mr. Khaliq barely noticed.

He had only recently bought land on a roadless expanse in Bakwa that cooked under the summer sun. But just beneath the surface, there was water, so bountiful that reeds grew in some areas. Mr. Khaliq, a mechanic, opened a tiny workshop to fix water pumps.

There were no phones and few neighbors back then, so when the Americans invaded, he heard about it only weeks later.

“We were desert people,” he said. “We didn’t care about the war. That was the concern of city people.”

That changed quickly. Before the American invasion, the Taliban had banned poppy production, sending opium prices skyrocketing. Now that they were gone, Mr. Khaliq switched from growing wheat to poppy.

Others soon joined, and the desert took on new hues. Bright flowers and verdant stems softened the landscape. The money was good — so good that the new Afghan government came knocking.

One day, Bakwa’s new police chief showed up to marvel at how productive Mr. Khaliq’s poppy fields were.

“I bet there’s over half a ton of opium here,” Mr. Khaliq recalled the chief saying.

“I told him it wasn’t that much, but he charged me for that amount anyway,” Mr. Khaliq said with a laugh. “And then he also asked for a bribe.”

With the Americans in control of Bakwa, eradication programs gained momentum. The district governor soon arrived with great fanfare, bringing a tractor, cameras and an entourage of police.

He gathered the farmers and announced there would be no more poppy because the foreigners were serious about getting rid of Afghan opium.

Mr. Khaliq and others watched with quiet indignation as the tractor plowed through a neighbor’s field. But after a short exhibition, the tractor stopped and a photographer was summoned.

“They took pictures of the small destroyed area,” Mr. Khaliq recalled. “Then, they took bribes and left.”

So went the early American-backed eradication campaigns in Bakwa, and the farmers adapted right away. They began pooling their money to compensate whoever’s crops were destroyed for show.

As word spread, newcomers began arriving in droves. Unfamiliar faces turned up weekly to Mr. Khaliq’s garage, dragging motors for him to fix. He stocked spare parts and water pipes, and began selling gas.

“Our business grew with the population, but we never expected it to grow so much,” he said.

The Taliban’s ‘pivot’

Mr. Khaliq didn’t care much for the Taliban at first. He found them harsh and overbearing, propagandizing about their faith while turning on the people around them.

“They were killing people and denouncing them as spies, even visitors who came to see family,” said Haji Abdul Salam, one of Bakwa’s largest landowners.

But they learned from their mistakes as they notched military gains. By 2006, a resurgent Taliban was carrying out its first major offensive since being ousted, laying waste to nearby districts in Helmand Province.

A steady stream of refugees arrived in Bakwa, and more Taliban followed, from fighters to mullahs, seeking shelter and opportunity.

“I moved to this area because it was safe,” said Haji Naim, Mr. Khaliq’s cousin, a Taliban fighter.

Bakwa turned out to be a great place to hide. The terrain was flat, making it easy to spot incoming raids. The ground was silty, which made planting roadside bombs simple. The roads meandered with such arbitrary vigor that only locals knew how to navigate them.

“There is not a single straight road in Bakwa,” said Mr. Khaliq. “If you spot a Taliban, you can’t even chase him.”

As they claimed more territory, the Taliban “learned to pivot,” said Mr. Salam, who helps oversees the main tribal council in Bakwa. “They began to prosecute their own officials and brought real justice and accountability.”

The Taliban eventually squeezed the Afghan government into a tiny corner of the district, forcing it to abandon any pretense of control over the area.

Hundreds of workers descended on Bakwa to collect opium sap each harvest, while an industry of buyers and smugglers coalesced around an open-air drug market known as the Abdul Wadood Bazaar.

The bazaar drew thousands at times, a vast collection of frontiersmen trading in illicit goods. An entire logistics network developed to serve the trade.

The Taliban ran neither the market nor the drug trade but taxed all of it.

The money added up — and caught the eye of the Americans.

Solar panels and mobile courts

Eradication wasn’t working. In 2007, the peak of the effort — with officials reporting 19,000 hectares of poppy destroyed — Afghanistan still broke a record for poppy cultivation.

Increasingly, the Americans and their allies began prosecuting a more conventional drug war in places like Bakwa, staging raids on smugglers and their networks. Violent interdiction became the norm, infuriating residents.

The Taliban, by contrast, endorsed the drug trade, at least while it was serving their interests. Though they had banned poppy before, they didn’t seem to worry much about the contradiction during the war. To the contrary, they appointed Islamic scholars who delivered sermons on the importance of supporting the jihad and expelling foreigners.

“The secret to their success was religious propaganda,” said Haji Abdullah Khan, a lifelong Bakwa resident. “People didn’t like the Taliban, but they didn’t want Christians or Jews here.”

On more administrative matters, the Taliban also assigned a district governor. Such shadow governors, as they were called, were high-value targets for the Americans and Afghan forces. But Bakwa was so safe for the insurgents that it became a magnet for senior Taliban leaders.

The Taliban established mobile courts, with judges riding around the district, meting out justice on the road. Prisoners would be locked in cars while the officiants went about their business, including the execution of thieves and murderers.

Sometimes, the Taliban would ask locals to host the courts, including Mr. Khaliq. Too frightened to refuse, he said he held more than a few on his compound, just as he sold them gas and offered them tea whenever they came through. But he never warmed to the insurgents.

Which made it all the more frustrating to him when U.S. forces, who operated out of bases in nearby areas, raided his home on multiple occasions.

“I just did what I needed to do regardless of who was in power,” he said.

A constant stream of visitors came to Mr. Khaliq’s expanding compound, which by about 2014 included new storage units, a new garage and a small kiosk selling snacks and sodas.

Lines of customers waited in his courtyard — sometimes for days — to purchase the most revolutionary piece of farming technology to emerge during the war: solar panels to run Bakwa’s ubiquitous water pumps.

“We must have sold tens of thousands of units,” Mr. Khaliq said.

The desert was transformed once more, now with the black tiles of solar setups. Water reservoirs became the norm, an incredibly wasteful method of irrigation that uses open-air pools, which evaporate quickly in the desert heat.

Newcomers claimed even more pieces of desert. The growth was so rapid that international experts on poppy cultivation, like David Mansfield, tracked it via satellite imagery, monitoring the stamps of green invading a sea of brown.

“The Americans and their allies pushed the farmers and sharecroppers into the desert, where they were greeted by the Taliban and welcomed with open arms,” said Mr. Mansfield, an analyst on Afghanistan.

By 2016, he added, more than 300,000 acres of land were being cultivated in Bakwa, a sixfold increase from 2003. The population more than quintupled to an estimated 320,000 people.

The Taliban grew with it. That same year, they finally claimed the district center in Bakwa, the last remaining symbol of the Afghan government.

The squat concrete building had been constructed with American money just four years earlier, in 2012. (Insurgents had burned down the previous one.) Once in control of the $200,000 facility, the Taliban turned it into a hospital.

“The hospital would treat 200 to 250 patients a day,” said Abdul Wasi, a nurse there. “It was a trauma center for the Taliban. Fighters from all over the region would come here.”

The local Afghan government, having abandoned the district altogether, moved to a few containers along the side of a highway.

Heroin, meth and taxes

Bakwa became a Taliban financial capital, collecting taxes like any other formal authority.

Though the American-backed government controlled the official customs checkpoints in and out of Afghanistan, the Taliban set up their own.

They placed them on highways leading to and from Iran, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, charging hundreds of dollars per commercial vehicle. The Taliban even issued receipts.

The money, estimated at around $10 million a month, overshadowed the taxes from poppy farmers and smugglers, local Taliban officials say — and it was all administered from Bakwa.

The district changed yet again. Poppy had been like an anchor tenant in a vast drug emporium. Next, labs began sprouting up to process heroin, a more lucrative venture. Those, in turn, gave way to new labs producing methamphetamines.

The labs proliferated along the edges of the open-air market. Some used cough medicine, draining amber bottles of pseudoephedrine and cooking it down. But ephedra, a shrub that blanketed the central highlands of Afghanistan, soon transformed the industry.

Hundreds of people, if not thousands, worked in the burgeoning meth trade, transporting, milling and producing the drug from the wild ephedra crop.

Mr. Mansfield estimated that hundreds of tons of meth were produced in Bakwa alone, even as poppy continued breaking records. In 2017, Afghanistan cultivated more opium than in any year since the start of the war.

The United States, desperate for a forceful response, redoubled its efforts. Fighter jets and B-52 bombers launched a two-year campaign to destroy labs across southwestern Afghanistan, including in Bakwa.

An estimated 200 labs were destroyed, many of them mud huts and lean-tos leveled by munitions that cost many times what they had obliterated. Little changed. By 2020, hundreds of labs were still churning out heroin and meth..

A drug market turned ghost town

The collapse came as quickly as the boom. One year, it seemed to Mr. Khaliq, business was bountiful. The next, Bakwa was practically empty again.

He noticed the change before many of his neighbors. Fewer customers came. Solar panel orders got smaller. Some were being canceled altogether.

It was 2019, not long after U.S. airstrikes in Bakwa killed 30 people, including many women and children, he said. Yet all anyone wanted to talk about was water.

There had been so much water, for such a long time, that no one considered it might run out. Experts commissioned by U.S.A.I.D. in 2009 had found a huge aquifer under Bakwa, one that seemed destined to last.

“I was surprised at the amount of water they had in the area,” said Darren Richardson, who had commissioned the study. “That was a significant aquifer.”

And yet, only a decade later, the water was growing scarce.

Despite the American airstrikes and water worries, Bakwa remained a center of the drug trade. Poppy had a long shelf life once harvested. Its watering needs coincided with the spring snowmelt from the neighboring mountains. The trade could hold on, residents reasoned.

But then the war ended.

The Americans withdrew for good in 2021 and the Taliban took over. Months later, the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, declared that poppy cultivation was “absolutely prohibited in the whole country.”

The Taliban claimed to have arrested numerous traffickers, seized nearly 2,000 tons of drugs and raided hundreds of heroin labs. In 2023, the Taliban destroyed dozens of labs in Bakwa, setting them ablaze.

Where the Americans had cherry-picked from the sky, killing or injuring innocents along the way, the Taliban removed nearly every laboratory in Bakwa. The Abdul Wadood Bazaar hollowed out.

With ruthless efficiency, the Taliban did what the United States had hoped for. They got rid of poppy farming, and in doing so, severed one of their economic lifelines.

The remnants of the boom haunt the landscape: abandoned well derricks, stark against the acid sky; old food wrappers and animal droppings desiccated in vacant courtyards.

Farmers blame the Taliban for their misery. For nearly 15 years, their poppy — and the taxes the Taliban collected from it — supported the insurgents’ war to establish a government.

Now that the Taliban got what they wanted, they have forgotten the people of Bakwa who made it all possible, residents grumble. Farmers too poor to leave now send their sons to work on harvests elsewhere, renting them out as labor.

“We have no choice but to stick it out,” said Haji Hawaladar, who had moved his entire family to Bakwa, trading his herd of goats for land. Now, he added, “we could not even give this land away for free.”

The Taliban seemed to have no reservations about leaving. Today, the district is largely empty of administrators and fighters. Many have moved on to bigger roles in other places.

“This was like a test, or an exam,” said Mr. Asif, the district governor. “Trusted people got important positions. The people who did well in Bakwa were top of that list.”

In Mr. Khaliq’s compound on a recent evening, as a honeyed light washed over the desert, nieces and nephews played in the courtyard, while a son stood idly by the gas pumps, waiting for customers who never came.

A few years earlier, his grounds would have been teeming with life. Today, he is selling a tenth of what he once did.

“The only thing that might help would be growing poppy with the water that is left,” said Mr. Khaliq. “But those who tried, the Taliban came and destroyed their crop.”

A few farmers have turned their fields to wheat, and shocks of green punctuate vast brown fields. Mr. Khaliq’s neighbors have moved away, leaving him alone with his crumbling fortune.

Like others, Mr. Khaliq holds the Taliban responsible. They could have enforced water rights agreements, as exist all over Afghanistan. They could ease their ban on poppy to keep the farmers afloat.

“The Taliban did not solve the biggest issues, water and the economy,” he said.

Like others, he knows some people are still hoarding opium reserves to sell at a high price, given the ban. Prices have more than quintupled since 2021, and some are still getting rich.

But everything he owns has lost value: his land and equipment, and hundreds of solar panels that sit in tidy rows, waiting for farmers who will never come back. The barren furrows of earth swirl like fingerprints over a monochromatic desert, a reminder of what was.

“This is life,” he says. “Everything ends. I will be done one day, too. But even if this ends, somewhere else will be beginning.”