The North County Times October 31, 2009
MILITARY: The Afghan narco state
By Mark Walker
Two weeks ago, a team of Camp Pendleton Marines in Afghanistan's Helmand province discovered a cache of drugs that included 50 pounds of heroin.
The Marines from the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment also found materials used to make roadside bombs, the unit said in a release.
Use of the homemade bombs has skyrocketed in recent months, prompting Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, last week to call for an Iraq-style campaign to "take back the roads" using every means available.
There have been few similar calls to take back Afghanistan from the drug lords.
The discovery by the Marines was another example of how drugs and the insurgency are linked in Afghanistan, a problem that has vexed the military for years.
Afghanistan is the world's leader in poppy production, the raw material for processed opium and heroin, producing 90 percent of the world's crop, according to a new report from the United Nations.
And in southern provinces such as Helmand where the majority of Marines are at work, half the population relies on the poppy for its livelihood, according to the U.N. report.
It's that economic reality that confronts U.S. commanders and military strategists every day: If the population depends on the poppy to feed itself, how can foreign troops win support from the civilian population by eradicating the crop or going after the criminal gangs and traffickers that provide the population with its primary source of money?
As a result, Marines don't proactively go after the raw crop, but will confiscate processed drugs and take down drug labs, officials say.
But the overall failure by NATO and Afghan security forces to aggressively target the drug trade ---- deemed the chief cause of corruption from the district level all the way up to the government center in Kabul ---- allows the anti-government Taliban to earn an estimated $100 million to $400 million a year.
'As fast as we can shoot them'
"Afghanistan is a one-crop country," said John Pike, founder of the military monitoring group GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.
Earlier this year, he suggested the U.S. could neutralize the Taliban and shut down drug trafficking by buying and destroying most of the crop and converting a portion of it to medical morphine for distribution to Third World countries.
"If the military can't solve the Taliban financing problem, then it would seem to me that everything else is a waste of time," Pike said. "The Taliban will continue to use the profits to hire people as fast as we can shoot them."
The U.N. report lays out the problem as thus:
"It has become difficult to distinguish clearly between terrorist movements, insurgencies and organized crime since their tactics and funding sources are the same," said the report titled Addiction, Crime and Insurgency, the Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium. "It can now be said that all actors involved in destabilizing Afghanistan are directly or indirectly linked to the drug economy. Insurgents' access to the opium economy translates into increased military capabilities and prolongs conflict."
The link between drugs and the 8-year-old war is one that NATO and the U.S. largely ignored. But with 64,000 U.S. troops expected on the ground in Afghanistan by year's end and several thousand more locally based Marines arriving early next year, the link between the drug trade and insurgency funding is starting to get more attention.
The Drug Enforcement Administration this year increased its agent count in Afghanistan from 12 to 80. Three of those agents died Monday when their helicopter crashed. They were the first DEA deaths in Afghanistan since agents began working there in 2005, the agency said.
'Drug lords and villains'
The U.N. report says that drug seizures by U.S., Afghan and NATO forces account for less than 2 percent of the estimated annual $1 billion worth of opium seized each year.
The Taliban makes its money by taxing the cultivation and resulting drug trade. Its levy has generated more than $600 million between 2005 and 2008, according to the report. It's that money the Taliban use to pay fighters and buy arms and explosives.
Corruption brought about by the drug trade is rampant, the 142-page report concludes, and economic hardship leads government and law enforcement officials to take bribes, facilitating the trade.
And while there are occasional arrests, the report said few are prosecuted and those who are often have their convictions overturned by paying a bribe.
The recent resignation of a high-level U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh, was in part tied to the drug problem.
In his resignation letter, Hoh wrote that Afghan President Hamid Karzi's government is filled with "glaring corruption and unabashed graft." Karzi, he wrote, is a president "whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains who mock our own rule of law and counter-narcotics effort."
Hoh also compared the realities in Afghanistan with Mexico and its drug problems.
"If our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminals and drug lords ... we must re-evaluate and increase our commitment and involvement in Mexico."
© Copyright 2009, North County Times - Californian
