U.S. increasing counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan

[Coventina]

Source: Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington -- 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.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-dea-afghan20-2009jul20,0,3098699.story

[damntexdem]

1. Counter narcotics: so now the CIA will be selling them over the counter?

I guess that might be more lucrative than staying on the wholesale end of the trade.

;-)

[timeforpeace]

2. Don't see how the effort will meet the stated goal.

[jakeXT]

3. Was there not enough produced last year, due to rising food prices?

Afghans swap poppies for wheat as food costs soar
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2008


Afghan farmers hope to capitalise on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch.

....
Haji Dawood, a farmer who used to cultivate poppy but now farms wheat in the Daman district, near Kandahar in the south, said his family had benefited from the wheat boom. "It's the first time since I planted wheat that I can afford to feed my family ... it's going well because the price of opium has come down, and the price for my wheat has gone up. Each new season we get more money from the crop than from the previous one," he said.

...

"It's a cruel twist of irony that when the British forces were deployed in Helmand ... poppy eradication was one of the key priorities, but it is the global economic situation that is doing the job for them."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/13/afghanistan