iirc there was barely any opium production in Afghanistan pre-2001 under Taliban rule. It was in the following 20 years that the industry boomed and a lot of those government officials you refer to and their relatives got extremely rich from that, including President Karzai's own little brother. The US put those people in power and propped them up for over 2 decades. It's pretty clear the US decision-makers tried to eradicate poppy just as little as they tried to create peace in the region (not at all).