Not just opium. You're doing a disservice.
The strongest pain reliever in existence, Morphine, and derivatives of it, are only able to be created by poppy produced in Afghanistan. Of course, artificial morphine can be synthesized, but there is no way to scale that production up to the demand of morphine. It must be grown in that soil.
That makes Afghanistan one of the most strategic locations on the planet. The US NEEDS this land if we're going to conquer the world, which is the desire of all nations. Neocons have been pussyfooting around the issue – wasting money on "nation building" as a front for occupying poppy production there.
What we *need* to do is either annex it, or create a puppet state. Preferably annex. Why? Because the US is strong enough to fuck everyone up all at once, and if we take such a strategic place, we'll have nearby regions gunning for us. They will hand their territory to us, and we will justify it with some slogan, "Only by making it a US territory can we protect it from terrorism, because only then do the laws of the land allow us to respond to threats there appropriately."
When really, we're just going full on imperialism. We'll say the same shit until we have the entire middle-east, with Israel as our ally until our borders touch. And then? We'll need their land. Their land-water connection is a strategic resource. We'll be the aggressors because they're fucking jews, of course they will, and we'll have the entire population of that territory ready to tear some kike throats out with US funding properly backing them.
That's the plan. Afterward, we'll leverage our morphine production to ally with slavic countries to do some more war in Africa, to "save the people". We'll call it a good war, and by all accounts it will be.
No idea what comes after that. No pieces are being played for it yet. Africa, however, has been deliberately destabilized for decades. It's easier to fight a country in chaos than one in unity. Same shit we're doing in the middle-east.
Mark my fucking words, this is what's going on. Screencap this and you'll have a (generalized) map of future events.