Exactly.. The reasoning is likely more complicated. The opium trade is a valuable asset to control, but so also is the distribution of the crude from the caspian basin. The control of the flow of oil is highly valuable politically and economically. After all, Afghanistan is right between Iran and other oil producing states, and China and Pakistan. After invading Afghanistan, there are milatary bases literally surrounding most of the main oil producing regions. The conflict in Georgia is most likely the Russian response to control the flow of oil from pipelines into Turkey. Its no surprise that we've been seeing anti-russian sentiment in the media!

As its obvious I am from Pakistan, close to afghanistan and there was taliban's newspaper published here and many people went to afghanistan from here to see how they govern between 1996 and 2001. All of those people reported that taliban had destroyed all the opium farms. Its an indisputed, well known fact that taliban destroyed all the opium farms, nobody ever doubted about it before you. Though taliban needed a lot of money to build war-torn economy of afghanistan and to buy weapons to secure borders they not used any money from opium.

If talibans were using opium money then they would have tons of money but they lived very poor lives (for eg ministers went to work on bicycles etc). Also if talibans were already using opium then how can its production be increased, it would only be sustained in that case. Remember that taliban had captured 95% of afghanistan by 1996 and for the next 5 years ruled a quiet peaceful country and all the war with northern alliance was at the northern border in only 5% of land occupied by northern alliance. Given that peace and 5 years of rule they would have cultivating and trading lot more opium than americans are able to do now in a war zone. So, the very fact that after american invasion opium production increased many folds proves that taliban were not using opium.