amic Movement of Taliban later emerged from these madrasas (and their kindred institutions in Pakistan) after nearly a generation of destruction of the state schools and the competing elites (nationalists, communists, Islamists) they had spawned (Roy, 1986; Rubin, 1995b). The production of opium was related to one of the major macro-economic changes induced by the war: a rapid increase in the supply of money, which, combined with the destruction of the much of the subsistence economy, induced an apparently large, if as yet unmeasured, monetization of economic and social relations, as well as hyper-inflation.In those areas where it could be grown economically, opium was the main expanding source of cash incomes, for both commanders and the peasantry. In some regions of Afghanistan (the upper Helmand Valley in particular), the climate and soil combine to create the world’s highest opium yields. The ease of marketing opium made it an obvious target for taxation and predation by local power holders. Equally important, however, is that unlike any other crop available to the peasants, its cash value as an export was so certain that the buyers –socio-economic conflicts related to the war have also developed at the local level in ways that differ from region to region. The collapse and partial revival of the state, the destruction of assets, and the mass displacement and partial return of the population has created a growing crisis in property relations. The old regime in Afghanistan had established private property in land and pasture and used these regulations in favor of Pashtun nomads and settlers in northern and central AfghanistanPeace could come to Afghanistan in many forms. It could, for instance, arrive in the guise of a victory by one faction, most likely the Taliban, or a melding or reconfiguration of existing armed groups, ending open fighting and transforming the criminalized war economy into an even faster-expanding cr...
