Shadow Facilitators and Alternative Crops in Afghanistan
By Douglas Farah
One sign of how concerned the military and administration are about the situation is the new thinking that is going on while looking at old problems. Two important stories highlight just how sharp the change in strategy is.
The first is the New York Times piece on the addition of 50 drug lords to the list of Afghanis on the Pentagon's target list to kill or capture. This is recognition of the symbiotic and devastating link between the drug trade financing the Taliban (and al Qaeda). The 50 are what the DEA would call "shadow facilitators," those who are able to deal across criminal-terrorist-tribal-ethnic lines to buy opium, sell heroin, import surface-to-air missiles etc.
Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman...said that “there is a positive, well-known connection between the drug trade and financing for the insurgency and terrorism.” Without directly addressing the existence of the target list, he said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”
That may be a distinction without a difference in the Af/Pak region, and one that has been made for years as the U.S. military resisted efforts to get drawn into counterdrug operations. But the fact remains that, unless the vast pool of resources flowing from the drug trade is dried up, there is no hope of defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda.
One reason is that the corruption from the opium/heroin trade has also almost completely corrupted the current government, making it both more difficult to combat and more corrosive within society. Never mind the money is used to sustain an army that has few other revenue streams.
But an equally-important part of the new strategy was laid out by the Washington Post in describing the new efforts to wean the local population off of the poppy harvest. My full blog is here.
