“When I was in Afghanistan, I was stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Sharana. This was a remote base in Paktika Province high in the Hindu Kush Mountains close to the Pakistan border and solidly in Taliban territory. I was in charge of the counter-narcotic detection K9s.”
US and Afghan forces have launched a series of attacks on narcotics laboratories in southern Afghanistan, marking the start of what could become a long, expanded air war under President Trump.
This is a welcome development, since the Afghan government turned a blind eye (unless we were looking) to the drug trade of the Taliban. At least that is the way it was when I was there working counter-narcotics for the various US agencies: DoD, Army, Air Force, and State Department. In fact, we always had a hard time figuring out who was actually in charge since it kept changing.
The initial strikes, which began last Sunday, represent the first significant use of new legal authorities granted by the Trump administration in August that enable the Pentagon to target Taliban revenue streams, according to Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top US commander in Afghanistan.
Speaking to the Pentagon press corps via satellite from his headquarters in Kabul, Nicholson said Monday that Afghan A-29 warplanes launched the operation. They were followed by B-52 bombers, advanced F-22 fighters, unmanned aircraft, and Marine Corps rocket fire. “Many, many targets have been identified. We are striking some, and we will continue to strike these targets as we further refine them,” Nicholson said.
Asked why the strikes were not carried out until now, nearly three months after Trump approved his new strategy, Nicholson said the operation required extensive preparation and observation by surveillance aircraft. The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates there are 400 to 500 opium laboratories across Afghanistan, and about ten of them have been bombed so far.
“These strikes required the mapping of their revenue streams and mapping of their infrastructure in areas where we had not done this before,” Nicholson said.
Hundreds of intelligence analysts have been involved, along with hundreds of hours of aerial surveillance, Nicholson added. He indicated that the tempo of airstrikes in the coming days would be roughly the same. The strikes have been concentrated in northern Helmand province, an area where the Taliban have long had control of the countryside. More than 20,000 Marines were based there during the Obama administration, rooting out the Taliban while training Afghan forces to fight the militants.
Personally, I don’t entirely agree with Gen. Nicholson’s assessment, and when I was in Afghanistan working counter-narcotics, finding the labs and fields was never a problem. All one had to do was see the obvious. We even had a marijuana grow operation on Bagram Airfield, one of the major US bases in Afghanistan. That one was tied to the Afghan civilian workers at the base laundry. The plants, about a hundred of them, were in plain view and growing right in the middle of the base. My team was informed that the marijuana grow was Afghan property, and we were not to make an issue out of it. That is the type of thing I call BS on.
The strikes Sunday hit seven Taliban drug laboratories and a headquarters in three districts across northern Helmand. Three occurred in Kajaki district, four in Musa Qala, and one in Sangin—all areas controlled by the US military at the height of Obama’s troop surge there. The largest, carried out by a B-52, struck an opium processing facility where 50 barrels of drugs were cooking at the time, Nicholson said. Video released by the Pentagon shows the building being consumed by a massive fireball.
The US government has pursued various anti-drug strategies during its 16-year war in Afghanistan, but it has done little to hamper the steady resurgence of opium poppy cultivation and drug trafficking since the Taliban’s fall in 2001. While in power before the US invasion, the Taliban banned poppy growing as un-Islamic and staged bonfires of confiscated opium and heroin, which was nothing more than a show.
The Taliban is funded through narcotic production in a big way. Pretending they were against their most significant cash crop was nothing more than a ruse. Poppy production and the drug trade are part and parcel with the Taliban. The income is used to pay fighters and purchase equipment, supplies, and pay bribes to local officials.
The US launched several ambitious programs to counter the Taliban drug trade. One was a crop substitution campaign that encouraged and paid farmers to grow almonds, apricots, green vegetables, and saffron instead of poppy. Another effort paid farmers cash to destroy their poppy fields and funded interdiction campaigns in which Afghan security forces burned fields under cultivation.
The appeal of drug profits, the cultural tradition of poppy growing by small farmers, and the involvement of Afghan and Taliban leaders in the cultivation and trade of drugs was a hard mix to defeat.
What many people do not realize is that Afghanistan has long been one of the world’s biggest producers of opium, which is used to make heroin, and the Taliban has made a lucrative business from taxing and providing security to producers and smugglers in the region.
To the Taliban insurgents, apparently abandoning religious scruples, the drug trade is nothing more than a business.
Now the Taliban has expanded its role in that drug trade considerably, boosting its profits at a time when it is making decisive gains against the Afghan government and its US backers.
According to a New York Times report, the Taliban has gotten involved in every stage of the drug business. Afghan police and their US advisers find heroin-refining labs with increasing frequency, but the labs are easy to replace.
The country has produced the majority of the world’s opium for some time, despite billions of dollars spent by the US to fight it during the 16-year-long war there. Afghan and Western officials now say rather than getting smuggled out of Afghanistan in the form of opium syrup, at least half of the crop is getting processed domestically before leaving the country as morphine or heroin.
To the Taliban insurgents, apparently abandoning religious scruples, the drug trade is nothing more than a business. They are increasingly involved in both poppy cultivation and drug trafficking as a means of supporting the war, especially in Helmand province.
Nicholson said that the new strategy does not focus on regular Afghans who farm poppy. Instead, it will target Taliban drug processing hubs, with the hope that if the Afghan government can expand the area it controls, it can encourage the growth of other legal crops. We already tried that strategy years ago.
A lesson can be learned from the New York model under America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani. That model was known as the broken window doctrine. It dealt with the small local criminal. By focusing on the minor crimes, the drug trade suppliers and dealers were eliminated to a large extent. In Afghanistan, that means focusing on the local farmer growing the illegal crop. Deal with them and the supply dries up. It worked in New York City against all sorts of crime. And I feel it will work here, but the Afghan government has to get behind the effort and not be purchased by the Taliban.
When I was in Afghanistan, I was stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Sharana. This was a remote base in Paktika Province high in the Hindu Kush Mountains close to the Pakistan border and solidly in Taliban territory. I was in charge of the counter-narcotic detection K9s. There were only three of us. Due to our scarcity, I was repeatedly tasked at all hours of the day or night.
The local US commanders were trying their best to make a dent in the drug trade. We all knew the drugs were funding the Taliban. One night the officer in charge (OIC) informed me he wanted to conduct an impromptu search on the Afghan guard force compound. He had developed intel that there was some questionable activity going on within the guard force. These were not US soldiers but local Afghan security guards.
After a contingent of US security was in place, we entered the compound. It took only moments until Jack, my K9, was pulling me to a water storage building. As he pulled, his nose was high in the air. I knew he had an odor and was tracking it in the wind. Fifty feet later, he stopped at the rear corner of a little wood shack, stuck his nose under the edge, and immediately alerted. Jack had a habit of alerting by sitting, staring at the point of the odor, and then if I’m not quick enough to reward him, he would turn and stare at me as if to say, “Hey. It’s here. I did my part, now do yours.”
I rewarded him by throwing his toy and bent down to look at what he was so excited about. I had to push him away as he always tried to be in the same place I was trying to get to. I looked under the corner of the shack and saw a white plastic bag that was half covered with rocks. There was no dust on the bag, so it couldn’t have been there very long. I reached under the edge and pulled it out and pitched it to the OIC, who was standing a few feet away with several other soldiers anxiously waiting to see what Jack had found.
The bag contained over a pound of opium. This was the largest find of opium on FOB Sharana that anyone could remember. It was a terrific find. Jack was petted vigorously, and the OIC took the bag and sent it to be processed at the base MP station.
Afghanistan’s problem is local involvement in the drug trade and the Taliban pressure over the locals, forcing them into drug production. That is a hard battle for the US to fight. If you remember the “Hearts and Minds” campaign in Vietnam (the doctrine that failed), it is the same here.
Later that evening, as I wrote up my report in the room, Jack lay under the desk with one paw on my foot. I reached up and got a small dog treat from a bag and gave it to him. As he chewed the small piece of dog jerky, I stroked his head and told him “That’s a good boy.”
