Ignoring the Elephant in the Room in Afghanistan

By Douglas Farah

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has sounded the alarm on Afghanistan, correctly pointing out that the danger of losing there is real and the hour is late.

It is fitting, on this day, to remember that our collective inability to get Afghanistan right once before helped give our enemies the opportunity to plan and execute the 9/11 attacks that are being remembered today.

What is striking about the published reports of Mullen and Defense Secretary Gates is the absence of any discussion of one of the driving forces of the Taliban's mounting success: its access to tens of millions of dollars in opium and poppy money. The UN conservatively estimates the Taliban makes between $50 million and $70 million a year from the drug trade.

Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room! Here is the prototype of future terrorist and insurgent movements deriving its income from non-state sources, and combating that figures into the policy at best in a marginal way.

In the 1980s the mujahadeen relied on U.S., Saudi and Pakistani aid, and became, over time, a largely state-sponsored, though non-state, actor. Now there is far less state sponsorship (with the exception of Pakistan's ISI), and the revenue is derived from criminal activity, an MO we will see more and more frequently in coming years.

The other multiple issues listed by Mullen are correct. There is a severe shortage of manpower and airlift capability. There is a terribly disjointed chain of command among the NATO forces and between NATO and the U.S. forces. The intelligence sharing infrastructure hardly exists. All of these are crippling weaknesses, and weaknesses that simply adding more troops will not resolve. My full blog is here.

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