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If "to target" means to capture or kill, this is not necessarily a good idea.
WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.
United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.
Color me eight shades of skeptical that reducing the Quetta Shura Taliban's income from narcotics will significantly affect their operations. I am, overall, deeply wary of counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan and what effect they have on our mission. If, on the other hand, we are "targeting" local power brokers -- and not just drug traffickers -- and by "targeting" we mean identifying and tracking, that might not be a bad idea. I think we should very much be tracking and mapping the social networks of power brokers in Afghanistan. What are their ties to the government? What are their ties to the insurgency? How do they earn their money? What are their ties to the narcotics trade? To what degree are they predatory toward the Afghan people?
Are we really going to spend our time, money and precious ISR assets going after the Pashtun Pablo Escobar? Again, why are we in Afghanistan? To fight drugs?
Our presence in Afghanistan is starting to look more and more like a hammer in search of a nail.
It's all well and good to target the financial engines of the insurgency. But does that mean we're going to capture or kill the heads of various Western aid missions in Afghanistan, seeing as something like 30% of development dollars are being diverted to the Taliban? Does it matter if the drug money dries up if rampant corruption does not?
The US has a terrible record on getting rid of drug trafficking within its own borders. Why does anyone think US forces will have better luck oversees?
I think there needs to be a new song called "mission creep" and it will list ("we didn't start the fire" style), just exactly what the US is doing there.
The US has a terrible record on getting rid of drug trafficking within its own borders. Why does anyone think US forces will have better luck oversees.
I think there needs to be a new song called "mission creep" and it will list ("we didn't start the fire" style), just exactly what the US is doing there.
For once, I won't agree with you Andrew... I think it's very important to take into account the "drug factor" in the AfPak situation as mentionned in the last report from the Institute of Peace (http://www.usip.org/resources/how-opium-profits-the-taliban).
The fact that you used the Pablo Escoba metaphor to describe the Afghan situation made me think about the central question: Does the fight drugs is a military or a police responsability ? With the past experience about "war on drugs" and Pablo Escobar history, I think it clearly shows that army should should avoid to get involved in this task and let the police manage those operations. Military should be there to help not to take in charge !!!
Regarding Gulliver comment... I would say that we don't need to the "heads of various Western aid missions in Afghanistan" (just kidding !!!), but we should seriously be able to monitor the money given on the ground... Not doing that is showing a serious problem for us not only in terms of "development dollars are being diverted to the Taliban" but also for "corruption matters"... Winning hearts and minds is maybe starting when people can see that the money is "real" and get to help them.
back of the napkin math: if you get rid of the poppy fields, get a new crop of something else in there inside of one planting cycle, then you get rid of the unserious hangers-on, the Taliban in it just for the GI Bill and college fund. Then all you have left is hard-core fighters, in effect draining the swamp and leaving US troops to protect the people. In just one step you have clarified to the local population the mission at hand.
Provided somebody gets in there in time with a suitable replacement crop.
My vote is for pomegranates, wheat and melons.
Hmmmmmm......melons!
http://newsblaze.com/story/20090730104013tsop.nb/topstory.html
It may also be that the heads of various cartels are targeted because they are ... umm. the heads of various cartels? If you consider the structures of quwam, it comes as a natural that the money-providers are central facilitators in the favour economy. I dont see this necessarily as a War on Drugs, but as a war on enemy logistics.
I dont see this necessarily as a War on Drugs, but as a war on enemy logistics.
Again, if this is true, then mustn't we acknowledge that Western aid providers are equally responsible for (though certainly not complicit in) funding "enemy logistics"? If you're asking us to ignore the fact that the substance of the drug traffickers' business is illegal, then don't the funds provided and the operations they fuel matter much more than the origin of the money or good intentions packaged along with it?
If we recognize that aid money is being diverted in substantial amounts, and that we seem unable to change this reality, then why are we focusing resources on interdicting drug money instead of cutting off development aid until security is established or corruption is rooted out, for example? (And mustn't we consider the insane timelines required to do either of those things, particularly without the use of infrastructure development projects and other aid?)
harrison ford's getting a bit old for this stuff no?
"If...by "targeting" we mean identifying and tracking, that might not be a bad idea."
There's no particular ambiguity here. What we've done is add fifty names to the Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List (JIPTL), bringing the total number of 'kill or capture' orders to 367 - that's not exactly a research project. The AP quotes RADM Gregory Smith in A-Stan saying that "The list of targets are those that are contributing to the insurgency, so the key leadership, and part of that obviously is the link between the narco industry and the militants." That's one version. But then it has LTC Todd Vician of OASD-PA, back in the Pentagon, declaring: "It's terrorists with links to the drug trade rather than drug traffickers with links to terrorism."
Great. So in theater, they're claiming that these are narcos with ties to terrorists, and in the Pentagon, they think we're targeting terrorists with ties to narcos. Which more or less confirms that we don't have any clear sense of who these people actually are, or what the relationships among them may be.
Reducing funding for the Taliban is, of course, a useful thing to be doing - but is this actually a reasonable way to go about doing that? If we killed these fifty specific individuals tomorrow, it wouldn't establish security in the regions in which they operate. The fields would still be full of poppies, and demand for their products undiminished. The death or capture of drug kingpins has not historically, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, had more than a temporary impact on the flow of drugs. And if the drugs are flowing through Taliban-controlled regions, they're still going to be taking a cut, irrespective of who runs the operations which they're extorting. That's the nice thing about a protection racket - you bear none of the risk of operating the business, and reap a steady stream of revenue.
This bears all the hallmarks of mission creep - and since they're no actual "if...but" ambiguity to what's going on, I read AbuM's post as a politic way of saying as much. We're not going to shut down the drug trade. We lack the resources, the will, and the strategic imperative to do so. In fact, there's a very solid argument to be made that our war on drugs in A'stan is counterproductive. Imagine, as a thought experiment, that we made it clear that US/NATO forces were not going to interfere in any way in the drug trade, since it's a purely domestic matter, unless traffickers became involved with the Taliban. That would eliminate an incredibly strong incentive that the traffickers currently possess to aid and abet the Taliban, which is presently their best hope of adding to their fortunes. These people have weapons, cash, and retainers - putting them on the sidelines of the conflict would be a major triumph. Moreover, it's no more or less odious than the deals we've struck in the past with various other categories of insurgents. By all means, train the ANP, and encourage them to crack down. But when we use our combat forces in this manner, were taking our eyes off the ball.
"Again, if this is true, then mustn't we acknowledge that Western aid providers are equally responsible for (though certainly not complicit in) funding "enemy logistics"?"
Gulliver, with all due respect, thats childish. Ever heard of dealing with the problem you can affect before bemoaning the worlds basic rotteness as a general operative principle? Also, by breaking up the drug-quwams, we also disrupt thgeir chains of command in a way that killing off various "named men" does. You dont seriously think that the Talebs best brains are promoted into Predator visibility range? Think bomb-makers in Iraq, only here its logistics and money.
Anyways, I dont know the numbers for how much NGO help that "trickles down" and would be really interested to see your facts broken down into less general terms, btw. Wich NGO help? How? Sources?
The above was mine. I would adress much the same critiscism to Cynic as well: The ambuigity of the "Terrorist" (resistance fighter?)/drug scene means that quite possibly those 50 are connected to the Talebs, and it IS a clear message to the others. Its at least equally plausible. Does anyone know the names and how they break down ethnically?
Gulliver, with all due respect, thats childish. Ever heard of dealing with the problem you can affect before bemoaning the worlds basic rotteness as a general operative principle?
Wait, I'm confused. "The problem [we] can affect" is drugs and drugs money, both of which continue to exist no matter how many people we kill or arrest, and not Western donors' development money?
Anyways, I dont know the numbers for how much NGO help that "trickles down" and would be really interested to see your facts broken down into less general terms, btw. Wich NGO help? How? Sources?
To make myself clear, I'm not saying that NGOs are helping the enemy. I'm saying that a lot of money that goes into the hands of Afghans ends up with the Taliban through extortion, theft, corruption, protection rackets, and so on. Here's just one example:
When the state-sponsored National Solidarity Programme (NSP) gave Pushtrod 200,000 afghani (US$40,000) to clean out the Nawbahar canal irrigation canal, he was overjoyed.
“But then the Taliban asked for 40 percent of the money,” he told IWPR. “Otherwise they were not going to let us do the work. So we had to buy them a four-by-four.”
While the Taliban drive around in their new vehicle, Mirahmad is trying desperately to stretch the remaining funds to complete the project.
“We are worried about the budget,” he said. “It may not be enough to do the job. We will have a lot of problems with water.”
In district after district of remote and volatile Farah province, the Taliban are taking control. But rather than chasing out the remnants of government authority, they are seeking to profit from them, by demanding a healthy portion of donor-funded assistance projects.
First and foremost among these are projects under the auspices of the NSP, a nationwide reconstruction initiative, launched in 2003 by the ministry of rural rehabilitation and development with funding from the international community.
One of the central missions of the NSP – which has dispensed millions of dollars since it was launched –
is to foster good local governance by helping communities identify and implement projects that are in their interests.
But in Farah, at least, a substantial cut of the funding is being seized by the Taliban, who are demanding a share of the funds for protecting the projects – from themselves. They then use the money they have extorted from the government to buy guns and ammunition.
Faced with the prospect of funding its own enemy, the local government is fighting back.
“We have received numerous complaints regarding [the Taleban taking NSP money],” said Shah Mahmoud, the deputy chief of the rural rehabilitation and development department in Farah. “So we have stopped sending money to some projects. We will not send a penny until serious steps are taken to solve the problem.”
Or here, if we're talking about money that goes through the government:
Corruption in the Afghan political and legal systems is "pervasive" and "entrenched," a report prepared for the main U.S. aid agency says, posing a challenge to the Obama administration's plans to steer more assistance through the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
"Seven years after the fall of the Taliban government, corruption has become more than the standard-issue bribery, nepotism, and extortion," says the little-noticed report, prepared in March by consultants to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It's become systemic, and "the officials and agencies that are supposed to be part of the solution ... are instead a critical part of the corruption syndrome."
And so on.
Gulliver: "Wait, I'm confused. "The problem [we] can affect" is drugs and drugs money, both of which continue to exist no matter how many people we kill or arrest, and not Western donors' development money?"
Yup. Is that so confusing? The contractors being blackmailed and (partly) the government corruption are conditional on the level of resistance and the oppos ability to dominate the field. Those are the hearts and minds and kidneys we are fighting for, right? So the aim is to weaken the force of the Talebs to the point where they can not excert such pressure to such a degree. Well, as far as I understand, the Taleb logistical/financial structure is built on three legs: Drugs, protection and foreign donations. The two last are hard to do something about, but the first is possible to target. It seems entirely logical to me that instead of alienating all the little contractors with lots of control and Bremer-like laws, we go after the big guys who are offically outside the law. Thats not "War on Drugs", its attrition and logistic denial.
This is your COIN. This is your COIN on drugs.
http://gringolost.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/this-is-your-counterinsurgenc...
Jesus, gringo and you all (and Exum too): Who passed around the Kool Aid, and why didnt I get any? Taking out the logistics base f the enemy seems to me to be an excellent idea, especially since opium is directly against islam???
Abu Muqawama, I agree that ISAF shouldn't get dragged into the drug war. Neither should the ANA, in my opinion.
What about all those drug/warlords with ties to the Afghan government rather than the Taliban? Killing certain druglords while supporting others (whether directly, indirectly, or by turning a blind eye) only further reinforces the perception among the Afghan population that we and the Afghan government are active participants in an mob war, trying to secure pecuniary interests for allies of the regime rather than actually protecting the population and enforcing the rule of law. It's no different than elements of the army in, say, Mexico, dismantling one cartel while letting another prosper. It's certainly no way to build legitimacy for the US, ISAF, or the GoIRA, not to mention the fact that the removal of some druglords will make the others more powerful--and no matter their supposed neutrality or support for the government, those criminals will need to be dealt with at some point before their can be a viable Afghan state.
"What are their ties to the government? What are their ties to the insurgency? How do they earn their money? What are their ties to the narcotics trade? To what degree are they predatory toward the Afghan people?"
Are you serious, Andrew? I can't believe you've been watching this for so long and haven't figured out the terrorist-narco-gang nexus and how it impacts the current status of Afghanistan. You really, really need to pick up Gretchen Peter's "Seeds of Terror" if you need it spelled out for you. Or maybe you thought all the McMansions in Kabul were paid for by government salaries...
Wake up, man. As long as the entire economy of Afghanistan relies on poppy fields, your COIN strategy of stabilizing the government (to include getting Pakistan on the straight and narrow) is a non-starter. Taliban and all their friends are raking in dough based on drug profits, and Pakistan and Kabul govt are complicit partners. Figure it out.
Af-Pak, blah, blah, blah.
I am not sure if this is an argument for or against IMET for the LAF, but it is fun to watch:
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2196.htm
So far Cynic's post is the only one I read that identified the problem: This is about demand. Fighting drugs on the supply side does not work. Killing kingpins does not work. If you want to make a dent, we have to get serious about addiction treatment and pushing back against those social factors in this country that move people towards drug use, be those drugs legal or illegal. That will be a long, tough fight in its own right, possibly a profitable field for CNAS to work in. There's a lot of common ground with COIN.
@ Jason Sigger and others who may think that targeting drug lords is going to remove a financial base for the Taliban
Killing or capturing 50 drug kingpin in a country that produces 90% of the world's opium is not going to do anything. We killed Escobar in Colombia and the rational was that the drug trade would decrease. That is silly. There's a profit motive and no matter who is running the drugs they will still get produced and sold. Pablo was dead and Colombia became "de-cartelized" but it still produces as much cocaine as ever.
I imagine killing 50 traffickers in Afghanistan will have the same null effect.
@ Fnord
Jesus, gringo and you all (and Exum too): Who passed around the Kool Aid, and why didnt I get any? Taking out the logistics base f the enemy seems to me to be an excellent idea, especially since opium is directly against islam???
We're not taking out the logistics base. We are aiming to take out 50 logisticians. Poppy profits will still be there even if 50 of these "nexus" targets are not.
And it is a bad idea for several reasons:
It is expanding a COIN mission that is already difficult/impossible (difficult according to optimists/impossible according to skeptics).
It could tighten the relationship between poppy growers, traffickers, and insurgents by uniting them against a common threat.
It is calling for the death of people who are distributing drugs and not engaged in combat. (this is bad on moral and legitimacy grounds, it'll call into question our presence in Afghanistan by other countries in the world)
Lastly, it just doesn't make sense as a counter-drug policy. There will be no reduction in production or consumption of the drug.
Can we all agree that counter-narco ops against growers is not inline with our population-centric effort?
Can we all agree that decapitation strikes against druglords (Taliban or not) will not reduce the demand/profitability of the drug crop?
Can we all agree that Afghanistan is neither Colombia nor Iraq? And that the US/NATO forces are neither a direct parallel of the Soviets of the 1980s or of the British (or Soviets) of the 19th Century?
Ok, NOW let's try to have a discussion about what can/should be done without trite comparisons and talking across each other's points?
I guess I'm a little confused, Andrew.
You seem to think of these issues in Manichean black or white: Either one does pop-centric with a whole lotta CORDS or one does Phoenix with a whole lotta bang.
This is something Stephane and I have been discussing in another forum: If the goal is to destroy the insurgent network, and the secondary goal is the need to gain the local population's consent to do that, is the latter an indirect path to the former? Or is it a strategic imperative?
Let's say that Phoenix showed us something that's probably right: Fracturing the social links between insurgents (killing the, detaining them, using subversion and rumors and whatnot to turn them against each other or deter others from joining the movement) is the best means to quash an insurgency. Something must break the will of an entrenched, motivated enemy -- terrorizing them is a good means to do so.
Gaining intel from the community in a pop-centric manner (including buying their consensus through the bribery of "economic development") might be vital, but it seems to me that it's vital only in how it affects the chief goal, which is to shred the network.
In this case, we have before us a range of targets who are known nodes in a network that connects drug merchants to insurgent leaders. If someone could make the case that by severing this nexus we could break the will of the enemy or stopper his ability to get funding, I would say that the campaign would be worth it.
But I fear other consequences: 1) The "people" in a weak, rentier state like Afghanistan have grown dependent on cultivating a certain commodity and then turning it into a value-added product that brings cash to a great many people (including those in the Karzai family). While this commodity is an illegal substance that's highly addictive, its destruction would nevertheless turn people against us. In this regard, like any other farm commodity, the means to most efficiently procure it, transport it, turn it into a value-added product and then sell it on the open market are vital to the "population" depending on this process. When you fracture the network that makes this happen, you harm the population, and they shall be less likely to help you and more likely to help the bastards who aren't killing drug dealers; and, 2) It becomes a waste of resources, ones that could be spent with an eye to locating, fixing and then destroying the insurgents' networked infrastructure.
CAVEAT: I actually would listen to an argument that suggested that by slicing the links between the feckless, corrupt and incompetent Karzai administration, their relatives and drug kingpins we managed to harm the ability of those asshats to make money, sow corruption and bring ruinous publicity to their own junta, I would be all for it! But then we probably would find ourselves dealing with a more recalcitrant and feckless and corrupt and incompetent government, so it might not be worth it.
SNLII: While I take the point that if we attempt to take away the population's livelihood then they are likely to rely upon us for an alternative or work against our efforts. But I don't think there's much love to be lost between the farmers and the drug-crop purchases. Most news reports have portrayed farmers as being deeply in debt to their financiers. The description seems to suggest that the farmers would grow something else, but they are obligated by the debts.
And even if they could grow other crops, could they be self-sufficient, much less profitable? Even if they could grow a crop for which there is demand, how would they transport it? There are so few roads, much less refrigeration, so the crop must be shelf-stable and cannot be fragile. What, besides narcotics, could this be? Honey, dried fruits, and nuts have been tried, but there isn't sufficient market or profitability.
I know in your post you grazed by this, but it was in terms of questioning their loyalty to the drug lords. I'm sure USAID has some ideas for drug crop replacement, but I haven't seen anything convincing yet.
My suspicion: I think our military is happy to "target" drug lords because of the power they wield (against us). There's little intent to disrupt the drug market, especially the growers. I don't have access to intel, but I imagine that the Kabul McMansions most likely to go boom in the night are the ones who become linked to insurgent activities. There may then come a story out of the WaPo or NYTimes about our "pet" drug lords who are allowed to prosper so long as they aren't connected to IED-component factories or militant training facilities.
I don't know, Timoteo. The reason why those 50 drug kingpins are in their current positions is because they're the most efficient at moving a fungible product to market (they likely also are the financiers, and without their help the market would suffer).
The Taliban make money NOT off of a direct role in the cultivation and shipment of narcotics, but rather on exicising taxes as it moves through the value chain to consumers. If the narcotics were instead, say, footballs, the Taliban would still take a cut.
The problem, therefore, isn't the widget but rather how it affects the insurgent's infrastructure.
Rather than killing narco-trafficking kingpins, one likely could go to the source and defoliate the poppy fields, but this rarely works all that well and ends up hurting directly the "people" we hope to cleave from the insurgency. We seem to want to have it both ways: To do the exact same thing indirectly by ravaging the drug infrastructure, but without the people realizing that we're the ones who are making the trafficking less efficient -- a quixotic pursuit likely to end badly (like this misadventure in the Hindu Kush itself) .
If we really wanted to help, we could embrace the feckless, corrupt and incompetent Karzai administration's backdoor deals with the underworld, establish Afghanistan as the world's pharmacy, and then help with "governance" to turn the mechanics of that drug operation into the most efficient, transparent and helpful narco-socialism possible, thereby gaining both the support of the population AND turning the worthless Karzai kleptocracy into something relevant to them.
If Afghans grew coconuts instead of vast fields of poppy plants, we wouldn't be having this discussion, would we? Because then USAID (still with a director-to-be-named-later) would be the most coconut-crazy agency in the bureaucracy, being all about helping Karzai's minions move that product!
I don't know guys.
While I would be the first to caution against any expansion of the largely (to date) unsuccessful War on Drugs both domestically or abroad, it would seem that one's reaction to today's announcement can only fall into one of 3 categories.
1) the Bacevich's et al of the world who caution against unnecessary and expensive (both in soft and hard terms) foreign involvements (state-building, support of failed states, wars etc), who would obviously see this as simply increasing the futility of our growing engagement in Afghanistan.
2) those who argue that our involvement in Afghanistan should be framed as a limited counter-terrorism, kinetic (mostly) inexpensive (in both men, monies and time) approach, who would see this announcement as simple mission creep
3) and finally, those who have long argued that our involvement in Afghanistan should be framed as one of growing state-legitimacy and institution building, a pop-centric (low or non-kinetic approach), would see this announcement as simply recognition of the need to target those contributing to insecurity and state/governance de-legitimization
Am I wrong???
SNLII says: "one likely could go to the source and defoliate the poppy fields, but this rarely works all that well"
True - and the Taliban may also be sitting on large stockpiles of raw opium from recent bumper crops, or converting it to heroin in some remote mountain lab.
The better option would be to go in to each opium-growing village and buy the entire crop, plus any stashes of raw opium, for say, double the market rate (which is low - as with cocaine, the cultivators get a tiny fraction of the final price).
The obvious problem there is that you could simply be financing the Taliban indirectly - if they can move through the villages secretly and freely, then all you've done is facilitate their opium-to-cash conversion program.
The way around that is through the use of tokens, redeemable via USAID (the 'company store') for things that farmers need in Afghanistan - water pipes, electric water pumps, solar panels, bags of non-explosive grade fertilizer, farming tools & machinery, and the like. If you can eliminate the opium AND the cash, then you've pretty well starved them out - the only thing is that they might retaliate against villagers who agree to the deal.
They could also grow hemp, aka marijuana, which is actually a traditional Afghani crop - or it was during the 1980s, when stamped bricks of Afghani hash started showing up in California, right around the time that the big covert push to kick out the Soviets was at its height... and today heroin is flooding into Russia:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/70851.html
and the US:
http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/afghan-heroins-surge-poses-danger-t...
Of course, if they did manage to get rid of Afghanistan heroin imports to the U.S., you'd just see a rise in Mexican 'black tar' heroin traffic... Speaking of which, maybe we can get Mexico's warring drug gangs to go to Afghanistan to take out the competition? It'd be just like using the Mafia to go after Castro... Send the guy from No Country For Old Men, Javier Bardem.
Warlords as a prominent feature in Afghanistan is a common theme. Now is introduced the argument against drugs: God and global democracy having failed to persuade. The reason that legitimacy is frail when the West becomes involved in combat against drugs is because the battle can too easily be seen for what it is, capturing from one group for the benefit of another the profit from drugs - extracting value, as others say.
May I redirect for a moment to the warlords of the West? Confine your vision to strategy, in pursuit of whatever 'noble' doctrine proves palatable to the cannon fodder, and it serves the purpose of allowing the world's warlords to continue in their successful domination of all sides.
Doing so keeps the wheels of commerce churning, feeding the life-blood and treasure of nations to those shadowy figures who profit without regard for any of the motives which occupy hearts and minds.
You continue to do so at risk of losing far more than empire.
The issues engaged in Afghanistan are not elements comprising a "war" which can be won through battle. Only through recognition of limits, and acceptance of the need for global co-operation, can the Western powers achieve any stability. The UN is dead? Who killed it? That is where the bargaining must be done.
If an enemy continues to fund itself via an illicite method then removing that ability may go a long way to reducing get enemy’s funding.
But…
Drugs are always going to be difficult.
Drug wars are won on the user end, because someone somewhere is always going be making drugs, it is just too profitable and easy to expect that it will cease while there are addicts to supply.
This is not a job for American soldiers, nor Australian, Dutch or any other, it is a job for some advisers and a lot of Afgan police.
I like G.D.’s idea about tokens, if you’re going to fund a buy out it makes sense to payout in a form that cannot be exploited (too easily) by the Taliban.
The Taliban takes its money from the opium trade by acting as a protection racket, correct? If so, then the answer is to supplant the Taliban in that role. Farmers there can't make a living on any other crop. We can't seem to find a good plan for intercepting the product in other ways. Our allies are in it as deeply as our enemies. Don't like the moral quandary that puts us in? And yet, we claim we want to win.
Farmers there can't make a living on any other crop.
Exactly, the only solution here is to pack off everyone in Helmand (including wives, children, grandparents, cousins, brothers, sisters) to ITT Tech and cosmetology school and everything else we would need to create a new economy, or we need to provide such great protection that it's impossible for the Taliban to intimidate, kill, blackmail, or injure anyone for not growing poppy while completely subsidizing the income of opium farmers for the foreseable future.
Even if we did manage to destroy a significant portion of the poppy yield, which we won't, the idea of a counter narcotics operation, as others have stated, simply isn't realistic.
Just think about basic supply and demand for a second: we can limit the supply, and prices will skyrocket and possibly keep the Taliban net income at an equilibrium. Additionally, the Taliban could release opium in the same way that the U.S. did the strategic petroleum reserves when gas prices increased dramatically, just to draw out any hopes of crushing Afghanistan's reliance on the crop. It seems like such a futile waste of life and money, to me at least, especially since there is no apparent realistic chance for success.
"Even if we did manage to destroy a significant portion of the poppy yield, which we won't, the idea of a counter narcotics operation, as others have stated, simply isn't realistic."
Hello? This is not about taking out poppyproduction, as far as i understand it, its about taking out certain key elements in the enemys logistical base and (quite possibly) rearragning the hierarchies of the drug trade. Its funny that so many hardcore realists dont see this part. Taking out 50 logisticians is a hell of a strike to oppo capability. Not to mention that breaks in criminal hierarchies cause infighting, unless they are diciplinmed like the zetas.
The obvious solution: wreck the Afghan economy & cease all aid. No production, nothing for the Taleban to tax. Ta-da!
And if the Taleban is simply taxing opium production (as is logical and seems likely), then there is nothing to gain from buying Afghan opium and destroying it. Equally, there is nothing to gain from any development programmes using substitute crops, since anything truly successful would result in exactly the same amount of revenue flowing into Taleban coffers, and hence make no material difference to the campaign.
First all, let's assume the drug trade in Afghanistan is relevant and that combating it is necessary to achieve our aims (both are pretty big assumptions). In that case, the coalition needs to be the biggest, baddest cartel in Afghanistan. You do that by explicitly targeting and killing the mid and upper leaders of rival groups and then you make the producers (ie. farmers) an offer they can't refuse - sell your crop to us, or we will destroy your crop.
Taking out 50 logisticians is a hell of a strike to oppo capability.
No it's not. It's a strike to oppo efficiency, and maybe it causes problems because it takes him time to rebuild those relationships with the guys that fill the seats. But I don't understand why this is such a difficult thing to process: the Taliban's funds come from every step of the drug trade: the growing, the transport, and the sale itself. Even if you eliminate the guys doing the moving and the trading, there are still growers. And there are new guys who will step in to move it and trade it. What the valuable substance is doesn't really matter.
First all, let's assume the drug trade in Afghanistan is relevant and that combating it is necessary to achieve our aims (both are pretty big assumptions). In that case, the coalition needs to be the biggest, baddest cartel in Afghanistan. You do that by explicitly targeting and killing the mid and upper leaders of rival groups and then you make the producers (ie. farmers) an offer they can't refuse - sell your crop to us, or we will destroy your crop.
Ok, so the coalition buys the crop. And without protecting the guy who sold it to you, or isolating him from the enemy, the insurgency still manages to extort the money you paid the farmer via protection rackets, tarrifs, theft, and so on. So now you cut out the middle man, but the bad guys are still getting their cash.
Well let's give our bureaucrats a momentary benefit of the doubt and believe trust that this mission has solid, achievable and beneficial objectives, that they're not just doing this in order to live out some Grand Theft Auto fantasy in which they take down mobsters.
If that's the case, then Visitor 7:21, and HUS have over-simplified things in arguing against the counter-narcotics mission, but Fnord has caught the scent.
I'm inclined to disagree with the assertions that the Taliban are limiting themselves to taxing drug production or that they are just charging protection money from growers. I don't think that there's such a separation of labor. Clearly we all agree that they're using the money to fuel their operations, but I don't believe that the Taliban are just skimming the drug money. The entire infrastructure of the drug trade so closely parallels the infrastructure and networks of illicit networks for arms and money that it's impossible for me to believe that they aren't one and the same. Are the Taliban growing it? Selling it? Transporting it? Smuggling it? It's incredibly hard for me to believe that they're not directly involved in these activities. Up to now, we've been limiting our searches to weapons, but now we're expanding our scope to include other accouterments of power.
So our government sends in another 3-letter agency (this whole-of-government thing is getting out of hand) to address a heretofore punted aspect of the conflict: the drug economy. So now you've got DEA doing interdictions and looking to bust some skulls. As I alluded to in an earlier post, we're not likely to look at the drug trade per se, but rather the drug trade as it relates to the Taliban. My bet is that if you want to grow, sell, or transport poppy and it's downstream derivatives, you'd best be making sure all the money goes into that Kandahari McMansion or Swiss boarding school for lil' Mohammed. If you're too liberal with your new found profit and fund some social or religious charities in the community, you may find yourself portrayed in the Afghan remake of Clear and Present Danger (as one of the characters who doesn't fly off in a helicopter at the end of the film, if you know what I mean).
"The entire infrastructure of the drug trade so closely parallels the infrastructure and networks of illicit networks for arms and money that it's impossible for me to believe that they aren't one and the same"
Then the Taliban would be the first armed movement in history to do that. Even FARC and Shining Path didn't see a reason to be a horizonally-oriented operation when it came to drugs. And then you have the far more nettlesome problem of how the various Taliban use sharia to outlaw poppy production (unless fatwas are issued to allow it, making the argument that it mostly is going to non-Muslims, a point on which the government in Tehran might quibble, but the Taliban consider them heretics anyway).
The reason the Taliban aren't involved in the drug trade is that, according to UN estimates, it probably accounts for no more than a third of their revenues, which they take throughout the value chain from cultivator to warehouser to shipper. So, where do Taliban taxmen make MORE of their money?
By skimming off our own redevelopment projects! No, I'm not kidding. Whenever we invest in local economic development, the Taliban get a cut or they shut down the project. No one wants to discuss this, but it's true.
Are we then going to argue that the structure of coalition-funded development projects so closely mirror Taliban tax collection services that they must be the same?
SNLI: "The reason the Taliban aren't involved in the drug trade is that, according to UN estimates, it probably accounts for no more than a third of their revenues, which they take throughout the value chain from cultivator to warehouser to shipper. So, where do Taliban taxmen make MORE of their money?"
Realy? So taking out a 5th of their 3d isnt a valuable strike? Realllly
The Taliban tax activity, Fnord. They don't tax the commodity. If the farmers don't grow poppies (for which they don't really make that much money, rather it's more guaranteed to get to market), they will do something else. If it's productive, the Taliban will tax it. If it's not, then the farmers will become wards of the stateless state or head as refugees to Iran or Pakistan.
Those who head to Pakistan will have their UN-delivered rations taxed.
If, as some promise, the US-backed coalition moves in to replace the poppy cultivation and downstream manufacturing of narcotics with other sorts of economic development, the Taliban will tax that. It really doesn't matter what is produced, so long as the shadow government of the various Taliban and related insurgencies can tax people, they shall.
So, then we must understand the nature of the problem: Fracturing the insurgents' networks is what's important, and doing so in a way that doesn't drive the population closer to the insurgencies.
If accomplishing the main goal could be made easier by ridding the globe of drug dealers, then I would be all for it. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening.
Looking back in history at means to fracture the insurgents' infrastructure, I see one program that did some good -- Phoenix. Just as we destroyed or detained Viet Cong taxmen, cell leaders, scouts and whatnot, trying to work our way up the chain, so we pacified the areas under our control. Other programs assisted in this (CORDs, CAP/CAC, et al), but they would not have been as successful if we didn't, well, disappear or reform or deter tens of thousands of bad guys.
The infrastructure: Our target.
That should be taped on McChrystal's forehead to avoid mission creep.
CAVEAT: When I say "infrastructure," I'm really discussing complex networks that often are NOT tied into each other. There are several Taliban militaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to mention quite a few local, traditionalist insurrections that transpired because of the occupation and the encroachment of a hated Karzai government. Each of these is, itself, a different beast, with different characteristics, leadership strata and revolutionary structure. Sometimes, narcotics are important. Other times, it's illicit timber harvesting or whatever.
Again, the important thing is fracturing the infrastructure that the commander sees before him. Turn their friends against each other. Make them fear a knock in the night. When they resist, kill them. It's ugly work.
Realy? So taking out a 5th of their 3d isnt a valuable strike? Realllly
Why do you imagine that this is what will happen? Why will the Taliban not find it similarly possible to skim from the 50 new replacements, or to coopt them?
OK, let me get this straight- y'all want to try out various COIN theories on someone elses heads. As part of this, we want to knock off 50 "drug kingpins"- and, of course, anyone else in range of the shrapnel & blast effect.
To prop up THIS:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/08/ingrates-abound.ht... "
As Ive said for a few years now: the ONLY question about Afghanistan is how many Afghans are we gonna kill/maim/destroy the lives of before we leave?
After the bogus elections of 68, how many Viets we kill before we left?
"When I put on the Uniform of my Country, I did not lay aside the Duties of the Citizen". General Washington said that.
Now I understand Abu Muqs take that the principles of this site are working from the POV that the US is required to act in this way in the Afghans. And the discussion here is not weather to do it or not, but how best.
new information inevitably requires new analysis.......why should US soldiers fight to keep corrupt parasites in power? How is that acting like free men? Is there some unknown to me track record of success in similar ventures?
just askin.........
It all depends on the intel, wether its smart or not, doesnt it?
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