'Awful, evil mix' behind Afghan insurgency funding

[troung]

'Awful, evil mix' behind Afghan insurgency funding
Updated Sun. Jan. 7 2007 11:31 PM ET

Canadian Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- An "awful, evil mix'' of Taliban hardliners, drug lords, black marketers and corrupt officials are funding the insurgency that Canadian troops are battling in the Panjwaii and Zhari districts of southern Afghanistan, a senior Canadian officer said Sunday.


"I call them the predators,'' Col. Fred Lewis, deputy commander of the task force in southern Afghanistan, told The Canadian Press in an interview in which he discussed efforts to uproot the insurgency in the Arghandab River Valley area.


Despite years of drought, the region remains one of the country's bread baskets, with plentiful grape orchards -- along with huge marijuana and poppy fields that have developed into a major cash crop for farmers.


As Canadian troops continue to push ahead with Operation Baaz Tsuka in this former Taliban heartland, there seems to be a never ending supply of money to fund the hiring of more rebel fighters or for training suicide bombers brought in from Pakistan.


"I think more people are more and more convinced there's a pretty close connection (between the Taliban and the drug lords), which is pretty ironic because in 1996 when the Taliban took over the country one of their platforms was `we're not doing drugs anymore,''' Lewis said.


"Why would the Taliban fight so hard for this Arghandab Valley triangle area that we're all so familiar with now? The fact is that valley has water and it's green,'' he said.


Lewis said probably a third of the marijuana and opium crops under cultivation in the Arghandab Valley are drug-related.


"So why do you fight for that? Lewis said. "Well if you're a drug lord who is making millions and millions and millions of dollars, is it worth paying guys $200 to fight so that the coalition doesn't come into your valley?''


The Taliban pay their fighters about US$200 a month.


"Yeah, I think there's a pretty close connection between the Taliban and drug lords. Is it about financing? Maybe. It's just putting two and two together and it's not based on any secret intelligence reports or anything,'' he added.


Lewis said using the term Taliban to describe all the forces fighting Canadian troops is probably inaccurate. A number of groups: religious, political and criminal have a stake in the ongoing instability.


For the drug lords, it comes down to making sure farmers in the area plant marijuana or opium poppies, Lewis said, claiming that ordinary farmers were being coerced into the drug trade.


"An Afghan farmer gets $200 a month for farming opium but my understanding is when he farms grapes he gets $500 a month. The ones making all the money are the drug lords,'' he said.


"When you're making in the millions, are you willing to have a gang along who shows up at two in the morning who says to Farmer Smith: `You're growing opium next year, right?'''


Operation Baaz Tsuka, with the goal of helping Afghans defend themselves, is the only one that will eventually allow Afghanistan to emerge from the quagmire, said Lewis, who conceded that the Taliban are not going to go away.


There are probably about 500 Taliban hardliners in the province right now and likely still will be 10 years from now, he said.


"They may continue to exist for decades, but they (the Afghan people) can get to the level where they can deal with the situation,'' he said, noting that the overall population of the province is about two million.


Lewis said Canadians need to know that the war against the Taliban and their associates is winnable and a "noble cause'' and it would be wrong to leave the Afghan people at their mercy.


"They are the drug lords, they are the black marketeers, they are probably certain corrupt leaders. You add that to the Taliban leadership and it is just an awful, evil mix,'' Lewis said.

[smilingassassin]

Hell if you can't curb the drug grow ops why not simply give them guidlines to follow and serious restrictions to where the drug profits go to?

Anywhere ther are illegal crops in unsanctioned area's you simply burn em from the air with incendary's.

[Swift Sword]

Anywhere ther are illegal crops in unsanctioned area's you simply burn em from the air with incendary's.

Hello,

While I share your sentiment, I think that destruction of the crops would be counterproductive.

The produce of the fields are a good bit of the enemy's cash flow.

Rather than destroy the crops, why not increase the enemy's opportunity cost to exploit that asset?

Here is a scenario for your consideraion:

First, we plant rumors among the agricultural community that something is in the wind.

Then, a little later, we plant a more specific message that the dope fields are going to get hit, possibly via the medium of leaflet bombing.

Let them stew on it for awhile while they farm with one eye on the sky, perhaps even buzzing them once or twice with recce flights to keep them agitated.

On the day of the strike, strike aircraft or prefferably even drones hit some BUT NOT ALL of the fields that have workers in them with a persistent riot control agent.

We might torch a field with no workers in it to reinforce the point if they do not get it.

Augment this with chemical mines filled with the same or slightly different agents to keep them out of the fields. Add colored smoke or something to make them think that the stuff is even worse than it really is.

If we have good intelligence about local jealousies and rivalries, that will dictate whose fields are going to get hit. Let the guys be suspicious as to why some are getting the squeeze and others are not and fill their heads with conspiracies. If we are lucky, they may turn on corrupt officials under the assumption that they are dime dropping to the Coalition to settle old scores.

The farmers will naturally be leery of working the fields and when the drug gangs come around they will see that the greivance is legitimate and faced with either fighting the problem or forcing the farmers back into the fields which will still take resources and drive a wedge between themselves and the community at large.

The key is to restrict the enemy's drug revenues enough to make him bite but not enough to have him abandon the enterprise entirely in search of safer schemes. The enemy may even have to increase his pay to the farmers to cover the additional risk which costs them money but gives the farmers more to put into the local economy which is not bad either.

Every Ak toting fighter, every MANPAD, every resource that the enemy spends protecting his bussiness is a resource that he cannot use to wage his war.

Another variation is to develop a chemical compound that can survive the drug refining process to use as a tagant so drugs upstream can be more readily tracked and intercepted.

Here again we can sow discord and keep people off balance by picking and choosing which shipments to take out based on rivalries and jealousies (we all know about paranoia in the drug biz, right?).

Anyway, that is Swift Sword's Poppy Field Pipe Dream; any merit to it?

William

P.S.: We could pull a Cuba on them if the budget is too tight for airpower.

Tie kerosene soaked rags to a wire two or three feet long and then tie those to the tails of cats. Light the rags on fire and turn the cats loose in the fields.

The cats naturally run away from the fire at top speed.

I understand that in the cane fields you could get three kilometers out of a cat.

P.P.S.: In the interests of being humane, we could always have a connection between the fire and the cat that was speced to fail after a certain time so the cat could live to cat like things another day.

[smilingassassin]

LOL your cat idea likely has some merit, and a very cheap method!

I tend to agree that if we can somehow drain their existing monitary resources that should be done too.