Yeaah – this one was definitely about the oil. Much more so than the Middle East imo. The US were allied with the Taliban when Russia was occupying the country. The CIA trained them and were embedded with them. It’s a different story now.

An excellent novel that touches on this is Ken Follet’s Lie Down With Lions.

It doesn’t just have potential oil reserves, it potentially has a trillion dollars worth of minerals too…

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/rare-earth-afghanistan-sits-1-trillion-minerals-n196861

And they always say it isn’t about the oil. The US was happy to deal with the Taliban no matter how terrible their regime was when they were cooperating on a pipeline. They’re only terrorists now because they’re no longer properly aligned. Same old story. Makes it rather difficult to believe the people there won’t simply continue to suffer.

Afghanistan potentially has HUGE oil reserves. That’s the real reason Russia invaded in the first place – to get their hands on it, and that’s why the US doesn’t want Russia in control there. There has been a lot of investigation, and there are heaps of places that have the right conditions for easily accessible light crude. If Afghanistan could get it together, they could boom. The elites of Russia, Iran, China, and the US have all been trying to be in charge of pipeline building projects, which are all called some variation on “Peace Pipeline”. If Afghanistan was secure from terrorism, the corporates would be in in no time. They don’t need opium to be rich – they can do it legally.

Getting the tribal warlords to cooperate has been problematic and the endemic corruption makes doing business properly all but impossible. The Taliban’s imposition of a theocracy was actually an attempt at a solution to these problems, but it created other problems.

Opium is important, but since I wasn’t writing about it, there wasn’t much point having a map about it. The focus was Kunduz, which is poppy free.

But what we should never leave out of the equation are the economic interests of the elites. U.S./ world bank funding can buy off some. Opium poppy growing is very important in the Pashtun strongholds. Afghanistan is said to have valuable natural resources. Are corporate investment dollars coming into play?

The opium growing map was not misplaced. It’s an important factor, as is religion. For religious zealots, like the Taliban, the enemy within is worse than the enemy without. Within the Sunni community there are very diverse and often antagonistic views. All factions, use religion to justify their actions. It’s like the scots, who were constantly at war with each other, when they weren’t at war with the English. Some times a Scottish king could pull the country together, sometimes not. Tribalism, nationalism, religion are much the same. They all rely on their myths to make themselves superior to others. And we’re all susceptible to it.

I looked into the ethnolinguistic divisions when I was writing this, but I confess it’s so complicated I didn’t really want to tackle it. As you say, this is very important in Afghanistan, and actually one of the reasons a secular government is so important. Imo it’s the only way for all the extremely diverse groups to work together effectively.

As for the map of the opium growing – your comment made me realize I’ve put the wrong map into my post! It’s supposed to be a map of Kunduz. I downloaded the map of the opium because I was going to write about that too, but it would have made the post too long and it’s not significant in Kunduz, so I left the topic out. Anyway, I’ll put the map of Kunduz region in now.

Although Afghanistan has a significant, and much oppressed, Shia minority, the Hazara, the main divisions in the country are ethno linguistic, rather than religious. (See map from my previous comment) The largest and dominant group are the Pashtun, from which the Taliban gets most of its support. Ghani and Karzai are also Pashtun. The Pashtuns dominate in the south of the country. The Northern Alliance was composed predominately of Tajiks, Harraras, Uzbeks and other ethnic groups.

As in other areas of the region, the mix between ethnicity and religion in the conflicts is complex. The Kurds are Sunni, but are fighting alongside Iraqi Shia against ISIL and related Sunni extremist groups. As in the two world wars, fought largely between Christian nations, religion is often not the underlying cause of violence, but a rallying cry and justification for acts that have other origins.

I highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood, for a historical overview of the interactions of religion and other factors in the origins of wars. Economics (or greed) is one of the biggest factors as you might imagine. Although you don’t really discuss it, your map of opium poppy growing areas introduces that important factor in the Afghanistan conundrum.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/US_Army_ethnolinguistic_map_of_Afghanistan_–_circa_2001-09.jpg/405px-US_Army_ethnolinguistic_map_of_Afghanistan_–_circa_2001-09.jpg