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DEA boosts its war in Afghanistan
By Josh Meyer
chicago Tribune
Posted: 07/14/2009 09:08:08 PM PDT
Updated: 07/14/2009 10:41:00 PM PDT
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government is dramatically expanding a long-neglected second front in the war in Afghanistan, dispatching Drug Enforcement Administration agents in an effort to decapitate the Taliban-linked drug trafficking networks that are fueling the insurgency and corrupting the Afghan government, current and former counternarcotics officials say.
The move is seen as a recognition that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won with military force alone. Until near the end of its eight years in office, the Bush administration failed to link the drug traffickers in Afghanistan with the rising insurgency, basing its anti-drug campaign primarily on an effort to destroy the vast fields of poppy that produce more than 90 percent of the world's heroin.
But that campaign has proved politically unpopular with Afghans and some NATO-led U.S. allies operating in the country. It is considered by the new administration to have been an expensive failure that backfired and drove farmers and influential tribesmen into supporting the insurgency.
The U.S is now shifting to a counterinsurgency campaign that will send even more troops to Afghanistan, but that also emphasizes targeting dozens of large-scale drug "kingpins" whose empires are producing vast amounts of hashish, opium, morphine and heroin, some of it going to U.S. markets.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former U.S. counternarcotics officials say they have grown alarmed
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by the increasingly close ties between the drug traffickers and insurgents in recent years.
Because the Taliban controls large swaths of Afghanistan, the traffickers and their support networks must pay them at least $100 million a year — and possibly several times that — to grow and protect their fields of poppy, run their sophisticated processing labs and smuggle their drugs out of the country.
Similar drug trafficking activity is flourishing in the lawless tribal belt that includes northwest Pakistan, and it is providing huge volumes of cash to the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida as well, those officials said.
"We see their involvement through just about every stage of drug trafficking, and in each of the four corners of Afghanistan," Thomas Harrigan, the chief of operations for the DEA, said of the Taliban. "They use the money to sustain their operations, feed their fighters, to assist al-Qaida."
In response, the number of DEA agents and analysts in Afghanistan will jump from 13 agents to 68 by September, and ultimately to 81 in 2010, with more deployed to Pakistan too.
The DEA also has been designated as the lead organization in a multiagency "Afghan Threat Finance Cell" that will go after not only the drug kingpins in both countries, but also corrupt politicians and other sources of funding for the insurgency, including extortion and kidnappings, according to DEA documents and interviews.
The DEA agents will be based in each quadrant of Afghanistan in an effort to bolster their existing network of informants and to conduct sting operations and other investigations.
"There are a lot of black holes in Afghanistan regarding intelligence; we don't know what we don't know," Harrigan said. "If the military stops a drug caravan, we want to get out there, exploit the evidence, interview the traffickers."
The drug agency will also expand the U.S. program to train Afghan authorities in how to investigate and prosecute suspected drug traffickers and their extensive logistics and support networks.
Many current and former counternarcotics officials praised the DEA expansion, which began with a reassessment at the end of the Bush administration and got a powerful boost by a recent Obama administration-appointed working group on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But some of them said that their efforts to sound increasingly urgent alarms about the growing danger of the Taliban-drug trafficker alliances went unheeded during much of the Bush administration, and that the DEA will be playing catch-up for years.
After Sept. 11, the Bush administration's focus on counterterrorism and, later, the war in Iraq, extensively depleted U.S. global counternarcotics efforts, especially in South Asia, they say. The DEA also suffered from hiring freezes, budget cuts and a lack of political support despite its intelligence showing ever-closer links between drug traffickers and terrorist groups.
In 2006, the DEA was given legal authority to investigate international drug traffickers if it could show a nexus to terrorism or drugs going to the United States. It homed in on several dozen kingpin-level drug traffickers in Afghanistan, including some politically influential leaders of the powerful tribes that essentially run the country.
But the Taliban and al-Qaida were regrouping, and the drug trade reached a record level in 2007, with potential opium production up nearly 42 percent from the year before.
"A surge not only of military but law enforcement is exactly what we need. It is something we have always demanded of the U.S. government," said M. Ashraf Haidari, the Afghan government's political counselor in Washington, who oversees counternarcotics and national security issues. "We know that under the last administration there was a focus on eradication. The focus has changed to interdiction, and we're very happy about that."
The ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, wrote to the White House in 2007 to warn that its focus on crop eradication and helping Afghanistan arrest some mid-level dealers "is not really changing the overall and deteriorating situation, while the big and powerful prosper and go free."
"Clearly there was a mistake made early on," between 2001 and 2006, said former Ambassador Thomas Schweich, who became the Bush administration's coordinator for counternarcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan in 2007. "Had we taken this more serious early on, it never would have gotten as bad as it is."
Schweich lobbied hard for a DEA expansion, as did then-deputy national security adviser Juan Zarate. The National Security Council recommended in August 2008 that DEA take the lead in a new Afghan Threat Finance Cell, basing it on a Pentagon-led unit operating in Iraq.
The DEA was unleashed to go after "previously untouchable" warlords, and the effort soon began paying dividends, Zarate said. But he said actually deploying the DEA agents to Afghanistan was held up due to negotiations over what kind of role they would play and how they would work within the broader, often contentious U.S. and NATO military framework.
Two months ago, 10 members of a DEA "FAST" team participated in the largest U.S. special forces mission in Afghanistan since 2001, a four-day battle to take out a major Taliban stronghold and drug bazaar in the town of Marjeh in Helmand province.
"Operation Siege Engine Two" lasted four days, during which time authorities seized a huge cache of weapons, explosives and bomb-making materials, as well as tons of drugs in all stages of production.
"They fought like hell to retake the bazaar," DEA Special Agent Nick Brooke said of the Taliban. After the dust settled, DEA agents found out why: the Taliban was using the drug bazaar as a command control center in which it could not only fund its operations but also essentially run the entire local government and control the routes of foreign fighters in and out of the region.
And the DEA agents were able to help the Afghan authorities arrest and obtain statements from those at the scene and to seize and exploit their cell phones, satellite phones and drug ledgers, said Brooke, section chief for FAST, the DEA's Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams.
"The beauty of this is that we get evidence out of it," Brooke said. "And since the operations are bilateral, we can prosecute these people under Afghan law" or in some cases under U.S. law.
Several weeks ago, DEA agents led another suspected Afghan drug kingpin, Haji Bagcho, after arresting him on U.S. federal drug charges tied to his alleged financing of the Taliban.
Privately, some current and former officials questioned whether the DEA expansion will help turn the tide against the insurgents, or what they say is deeply entrenched corruption at all levels of Afghan government.
"I'm not going to minimize the corruption issue," Harrigan said. "It happens. People are paid off. But we are looking at that problem very, very closely."
Michael Braun, the former DEA deputy administrator who played a lead role in pushing through the DEA expansion, said the drug-related corruption is so pervasive that no one in Afghanistan is unscathed by it.
"It's Afghanistan, and people survived any way that they could. And some who were involved with drugs in the past are no longer today and are trying to do the right thing," Braun said. "Should we not work with them? If that was the case there would be absolute gridlock. We couldn't work with anyone."
http://www.contracostatimes.com/nationandworld/ci_12839063
