The Taliban-Heroin Connection
By Douglas Farah
The case of Khan Mohammed is drawing wide-spread coverage, and rightly so. He is the first known Taliban to convicted of drug trafficking. He was sentenced yesterday to two life sentences.
It was another (along with Viktor Bout, Monzar al Kassar, and other "shadow facilitators") in a series of successful, aggressive moves by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in tackling not just drugs, but those that use the money to arm those who want to carry out attacks around the globe, particularly aimed at the United States.
As prosecutor Matthew Stiglitz said in court yesterday, Mohammed's "significance ultimately rests with the symbiotic confluence of two worlds: drugs and terrorism. Without him or men like him, there is no effective insurgency in Afghanistan."
The same can be said for numerous insurgent groups that continue to exist because of the money generated from the nexus to organized crime.
I know I have hammered on this point a lot recently, but there is still so little attention focused on this that I think it is necessary, especially when the concept is so strongly reinforced by a tangible case.
This is the future, and we must understand what is coming at us if effective policies are going to be made, and resources allocated, to combat it. There is no doubt states such as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Russia present a host of challenges. There is also no doubt that these states need and profit from non-state groups that rely on these shadow facilitators and criminal/terrorist organizations to carry out certain policy objectives. My full blog is here.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://counterterrorismblog.org/mt/pings.cgi/5645
