| | |  Americas & Beyond | July 2009 
U.S. 'Surge' Against Afghan Poppy
 Josh Meyer - Los Angeles Times
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July 23, 2009
| | Poppy (telegraph.co.uk) | |
Washington - The U.S. government is deploying dozens of Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Afghanistan in a new kind of "surge," targeting trafficking networks that officials say are increasingly fueling the Taliban insurgency and corrupting the Afghan government.
The move to dramatically expand a second front is seen as the latest acknowledgment in Washington that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won with military force alone.
For much of its eight-year tenure, the Bush administration's counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan were focused on destroying the poppy fields that have long been the source of the world's heroin. Since 2001, Afghanistan's contribution to the global heroin trade has risen to 93 percent, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime.
But the Obama administration believes eradication efforts drove many farmers and influential tribesmen into supporting the Islamist insurgency. The Afghan government and some NATO allies in the country agree.
The United States is now shifting to a counter-insurgency campaign that in addition to sending more troops is funding nation-building efforts and promoting alternative crops to farmers who have long profited from poppy production.
The increased DEA effort is aimed at more than a dozen drug "kingpins" whose networks are producing vast amounts of hashish, opium, morphine and heroin.
Some of these "kingpins" belong either to the Taliban or to influential tribes allied with it, and they are assisted by international drug trafficking rings that have flourished for decades in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, DEA officials say.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former U.S. counter-narcotics officials said they were alarmed by the growing ties between drug traffickers and insurgents and the Afghan government's inability or lack of interest to go after them.
As hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the U.S.-led coalition was allocated to build Afghan police and security forces, the forces were being corrupted simultaneously at the highest levels by the very traffickers they were supposed to be capturing, said Bruce Riedel, who chaired the Obama administration's interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Our whole effort at developing security in Afghanistan was undermined by having a Ministry of Interior that was interested in facilitating the drug trade," Riedel said. |
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