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News (Media Awareness Project) - Afghanistan: DEA Pursues a New Front in Afghan War
Title:Afghanistan: DEA Pursues a New Front in Afghan War
Published On:2009-07-20
Source:Los Angeles Times (CA)
Fetched On:2009-07-20 17:33:33
DEA PURSUES A NEW FRONT IN AFGHAN WAR

U.S. Shifts Its Drug Focus From Eradicating Poppy to Targeting
Trafficking, Seen As Aiding the Taliban.

The U.S. government is deploying dozens of Drug Enforcement
Administration agents to Afghanistan in a new kind of "surge,"
targeting trafficking networks that officials say are increasingly
fueling the Taliban insurgency and corrupting the Afghan government.

The move to dramatically expand a second front is seen as the latest
acknowledgment in Washington that security in Afghanistan cannot be
won with military force alone.

For much of its eight-year tenure, the Bush administration's
counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan were focused on destroying
the vast fields of poppy that have long been the source of the
world's heroin. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Afghanistan's
contribution to the global heroin trade has risen to 93%, according
to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime.

But the Obama administration believes that the effort drove many
farmers and influential tribesmen into supporting the Islamist
insurgency. The Afghan government and some NATO allies in the country agree.

The United States is now shifting to a counterinsurgency campaign
that in addition to sending more troops is funding nation-building
efforts and promoting alternative crops to farmers who have long
profited from poppy production.

The increased DEA effort is aimed at more than a dozen drug kingpins
whose networks are producing vast amounts of hashish, opium, morphine
and heroin, some of which ends up in the United States.

Some of these figures belong either to the Taliban or to influential
tribes allied with it, and they are assisted by international drug
trafficking rings that have flourished for decades in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and nearby countries, DEA officials say.

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former U.S.
counter-narcotics officials said they were alarmed by the growing
ties between drug traffickers and insurgents and the Afghan
government's inability or lack of interest by many Afghan officials
to go after them.

As hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the U.S.-led coalition
was allocated to build Afghan police and security agencies, the
forces were being corrupted simultaneously at the highest levels by
the very traffickers they were supposed to be capturing, said Bruce
Riedel, who chaired the Obama administration's interagency review of
policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Our whole effort at developing security in Afghanistan was
undermined by having a Ministry of Interior that was interested in
facilitating the drug trade rather than combating it," said Riedel,
who retired from the CIA in 2006 after three decades of advising
administrations on South Asia national security issues. The current
Afghan interior minister, Mohammed Hanif Atmar, Riedel said, is
honest and well-intentioned -- and in mortal danger because of it.

"If we can keep him alive, he'll do a great job. But he's got a lot
of enemies," said Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

With the Taliban now controlling large swaths of Afghanistan,
traffickers and their networks pay the militants as much as $500
million a year, according to U.S. and U.N. intelligence estimates, to
grow and protect the poppy fields, smuggle the drugs and run
sophisticated processing labs and drug bazaars in Afghanistan and
neighboring countries.

Similar drug trafficking activity is flourishing in the tribal belt
that includes northwestern Pakistan, and it is providing huge amounts
of cash to the Pakistani Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda, the 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, deputy administrator and chief of operations for the DEA,
said of the Taliban. "They use the money to sustain their operations,
feed their fighters, to assist Al Qaeda."

In response, the number of DEA agents and analysts in Afghanistan
will rise from 13 to 68 by September, and to 81 in 2010. More agents
will also be deployed in Pakistan. It is "the most prolific expansion
in DEA history," Harrigan said.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan
and Pakistan, told Congress in June that the Obama administration was
redirecting resources that lawmakers had appropriated for opium
eradication toward the new strategy of "interdiction, rule of law --
going after the big guys. And those involve people in the government."

The DEA also has been designated as the lead in a multi-agency
"Afghan Threat Finance Cell" that will go after not only the
suspected drug kingpins, but also corrupt politicians and other
sources of funding for the insurgency, including cash from wealthy
Persian Gulf donors, extortion and kidnappings, according to DEA
documents and interviews.

It will also expand a U.S. program to train Afghan counter-narcotics police.

"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, political counselor at the
Afghan Embassy in Washington, who oversees counter-narcotics and
national security issues.

Haidari said the new U.S. focus would allow the Afghan government to
go after corrupt elements in government and the security forces, in
part through specially trained and vetted Afghan narcotics police units.

DEA agents in Afghanistan will seek to cultivate informants and
conduct sting operations. In battle zones, particularly in the south,
they will receive military protection and support when needed.

"There are a lot of black holes in Afghanistan regarding
intelligence," Harrigan said. "If the military stops a drug caravan,
we want to get out there, exploit the evidence, interview the traffickers."

Many counter-narcotics officials, current and former, praised the DEA
expansion, which they said they had pushed for since late 2006 but
had faced seeming indifference or outright opposition from others in
the Bush administration, including elements of the military and
intelligence communities.

Some of these officials said that their warnings about the growing
danger of the Taliban-drug trafficker alliances went unheeded in the
years after Sept. 11, when America's focus on counter-terrorism and,
later, the war in Iraq, took precedence over counter-narcotics efforts.

In March 2006, the DEA was given additional authorization by Congress
to investigate international drug traffickers if it could show a
connection to terrorism. That allowed it to target and arrest a few
top traffickers in Afghanistan.

The next year, a key interagency task force recommended sending more
DEA agents into Afghanistan. But DEA officials say they couldn't
deploy the agents because of hiring freezes, a lack of administration
support, and the Pentagon's failure to get involved in interdiction
efforts or to help the drug agents already in the country.

"We would have needed State Department and White House approval and,
moreover, had we sent them over, we knew we would not be able to get
them into the field where they needed to be" without military
support, said Michael Braun, who played a lead role in lobbying for
the DEA expansion until his retirement seven months ago as its chief
of operations.

By 2007, as the Taliban and Al Qaeda were regrouping, the drug trade
reached a record level, with potential opium production up nearly 42%
from the year before, according to DEA and CIA reports.

"Clearly there was a mistake made early on," between 2001 and 2006,
said Thomas Schweich, who became the Bush administration's
coordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan
in 2007. "Had we taken this more seriously early on, it never would
have gotten as bad as it is."

DEA officials pushing for an Afghan expansion in 2007 were supported
by then-deputy national security advisor Juan Carlos Zarate, who was
in charge of global counter-terrorism and finance issues. But, Zarate
said, deployment was held up again amid negotiations over what kind
of role they would play.

Riedel said the Bush White House "never focused its attention on this
until the very, very last days."

"They created the perfect storm: We're losing the war against the
Taliban, and we've allowed the development of a huge drug industry
which corrupts the very state we're trying to help," he said.

Two months ago, nine DEA agents 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.

Authorities say they seized a huge cache of weapons, explosives and
bomb-making materials, as well as many tons of drugs in all stages of
production.

DEA agents were able to help Afghan authorities arrest and obtain
statements from those at the scene and to seize and exploit their
cellphones, satellite phones and drug ledgers, said DEA Special Agent
Nick Brooke.

"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, off a plane at Andrews Air Force Base near
Washington, after arresting him on U.S. federal drug charges tied to
his alleged financing of the Taliban.

At the same time, some current and former officials question whether
Afghan government corruption and indifference are too rampant to turn
the tide. Recently, President Hamid Karzai pardoned at least five
convicted major drug traffickers, prompting a rare U.S. State
Department rebuke.
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