And according to Sopko’s congressional testimony, things are bad. Really bad.

Since the fall of the Taliban government at the start of the war, the United States has invested $10 billion to fight the Afghan drug trade, through efforts such as ending poppy cultivation, halting the manufacture of narcotics, establishing drug treatment programs, and building a robust counternarcotics police force and criminal justice system. This might be money well spent, as 90 percent of the world’s opium originates in Afghanistan. No effort to build a stable nation there can succeed amid the hurricane forces of financial and institutional corruption that come with a thriving drug trade.

But 12 years and $10 billion later, according to Sopko’s testimony, “Afghan farmers are growing more opium poppies today than at any time in their modern history,” and despite the “mammoth investment” of American dollars and blood, “more land in Afghanistan is under poppy cultivation today than it was when the United States overthrew the Taliban in 2002.”

Still, the optimist might argue, good policies under hard conditions take time to bear fruit. So five years after President Obama assumed decisive control over our strategy in Afghanistan and tripled the number of U.S. service members in that war, are his efforts finally set to pay dividends? Said Sopko: “In the opinion of almost everyone I spoke with, the situation in Afghanistan is dire with little prospect for improvement in 2014 or beyond.” As a result, “All of the fragile gains we have made over the last twelve years on women’s issues, health, education, rule of law, and governance are now, more than ever, in jeopardy of being wiped out by the narcotics trade which not only supports the insurgency, but also feeds organized crime and corruption.”

One-third of the Taliban’s funding is thought to come from opium. And though U.S. officials have remained fixed in the denial stage of the Kübler-Ross model, claiming that we can work with elements of the Taliban, the news remains bleak all the same. According to Sopko, “It is widely thought that every drug organization supports or works with insurgents in Afghanistan.”

The exhausted American might wonder: Why does it matter? With the litany of problems in Afghanistan, why should we care about fields of pink flowers and the drugs they yield? This is a fair question, but assumes that the drug trade is an island unto itself. Not so, according to the inspector general. “Opium cultivation and insecurity go hand in hand,” the report noted. “About 89% of total poppy cultivation this year occurred in Afghanistan’s southern and western regions, where insurgents and criminal networks are strongest.”

And the problem is spreading. Nangarhar, the eastern province in Afghanistan whose capital is Jalalabad, was declared “poppy free” in 2008 and had been hailed as a model province. In the span of one year, however—from 2012 to 2013—poppy cultivation has increased 500 percent, now covering 15,719 hectares of the province.