Heroin Killing U.S. Effort in Afghanistan

By Jeff Stein | July 28, 2008 12:53 PM | | Comments (0)

Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.

Currently there are 36,000 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, including 17,500 serving with the U.S.-led NATO coalition and another 18,500 conducting training and counterinsurgency operations.

By comparison, in the 1980s the Soviet Union had from 80,000 to 104,000 troops in-country at any one time over its 10-year, ultimately futile occupation, during which time it built a 300,000-strong Afghan army in a losing effort to fight the U.S.-backed mujahideen.

But in light of new revelations on Afghanistan, comparing the U.S. campaign to the Soviets' may be less apt than harking back to the American experience in South Vietnam, where high-level official corruption negated the effort of over a half million troops and tens of thousands more civilians in the late 1960s.

Writing yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the State Department's former number two anti-drug official, Thomas Schweich, described U.S. efforts to counter the cultivation of poppies -- which make heroin -- as stymied by the Pentagon, which has  resisted getting involved in the drug war, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his cronies, who have bought the loyalty of the drug lords by letting them turn their turf into the world's leading heroin source. 

"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said)  he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."

Problem: The main growth of poppy farming is in provinces where the Taliban dominate, filling their coffers.
Karzai could care less, in Schweich's account.

"(He) was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term."

Gary Berntsen, who led one of the first CIA teams into Afghanistan after 9/11 and just came back from a year-long tour there with 173rd Airborne troops, told me minutes ago that the situation is less dire than generally portrayed in the media, but also more serious.

"We  haven't lost the war, but the enemy has penetrated deeply in two provinces away from the Pakistan border," where it has found protection, Berntsen said. 

He said he's read Schweich's piece and agreed with much of it, adding that corruption has allowed the rebels to dramatically increase poppy cultivation, which funds their insurgency, over the past year.

Equally ominous, Bertsen said the rebel forces were no long comprised only of Taliban fighters.

"There are Pakistanis .. and Kashmiris fighting there now," he said, naming a number of radical Sunni organizations inside and outside of Pakistan supplying fighters for the Holy War in Afghanistan.

But the U.S. is looking like it's digging in for the long haul, at least on one front reminiscent of the Iraq War: civilian contractors -- according to data dug up by The Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

One program is designed to  "to increase licit and commercially viable agricultural-based alternatives for rural Afghans" to replace drug production, Pincus reported.

"The target area is the six provinces in southern Afghanistan described as 'most insecure and unstable,' including Helmand and Kandahar.

Tags: Afghanistan, Afghan War, CIA, corruption, drugs, election fraud, heroin, insurgency, mujahideen, Obama, poppies

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