U.S. Seeks to Pursue Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban

[steven johnson]

Source: NY Times

August 10, 2009
WASHINGTON - Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.
United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military's rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.
In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the "joint integrated prioritized target list." That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.


Read more: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=420027&f=19

---

Until now the US strategy has focused on destroying poppy crops. Now the want to provide incentives to farmers to leave the drug trade - including the possibility of paying them to grow nothing and going after the drug runners and drug lords.

[EFerrari]

1. I hope they catch Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, too.

[DCKit]

2. Solution to Taliban funding: Buy the raw opium from the farmers and burn it.

The farmers have an income (until they transition to crops) and the Taliban gets squat.

Why does there always have to be a convoluted "military" solution?

[Downwinder]

3. Because the CIA has to get their share.

[laststeamtrain]

4. As we all know US drug interdiction efforts have worked so well in the past. n/t.

[pettypace]

5. This is a HUGE deal

Look at the significance of the operation being suggested here:

Our military, a foreign military force, is being authorized to EXECUTE another nation's DOMESTIC criminals.

Think about that. How bizzare is it that the US military has become the defacto police of Afghanistan, only with the unbelievable ability to KILL Afghan criminals without regard. How exactly are Afghan druglords a threat to the United States homeland.



There's a valid reason the NY Times has this as the banner headline.

[Flaneur]

6. What about the drug lords tied to our ally Karzai?

Like his brother.

I guess some drug lords are more equal than others.

[DallasNE]

7. The Possible Taliban Link Is Interesting

When the Taliban under Omar ruled Afghanistan they did do one good thing. They cut poppy cultivation down to a very low level on religious grounds. Those religious grounds are still in place so this link between drug lords and the Taliban sound suspect. Very suspect.

Also, Afghanistan is a land-locked country, meaning that the drugs have to cross a border with another country. Why not shut down the borders. And why not send over a bunch of drug-sniffing dogs to uncover the warehouses. Everybody likes the idea of killing two birds with one stone but we could end up being shut out. Besides, I think there are more effective tactics available. What can I say other than that I smell a rat.

[Wilms]

8. Shut the borders? HA!

U.S.-built bridge is windfall — for illegal Afghan drug trade

June 28, 2009

By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

NIZHNY PANJ, Tajikistan — In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia's poorest countries.

snip

Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It's paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe.

snip

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States and other Western powers looked the other way as opium and heroin production surged to record levels, making Afghanistan by far the world's biggest producer.

Much of the ballooning supply of drugs shipped across Afghanistan's northern border, up to one-fifth of the country's output, has traveled to and through Tajikistan. The opium and heroin funded rampant corruption in Tajikistan and turned the country, still hobbled by five years of civil war in the 1990s, into what at times seems like one big drug-trafficking organization.

snip

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/70849.html

[DallasNE]

9. This Reinforces My Point

This is Northern Alliance territory, not Taliban territory meaning the policy change is misdirected as I said. Tajikistan is also land-locked so the drugs have to cross still other borders and a diplomatic solution rather than a narrow-based military solution -- one that cannot be maintained over a long period of time.

[Vidar]

10. As opposed to Karzai's drug lords & the CIA's drug lords. Lets pass

an extra secret edict that they have to wear different colored turbans so we can determine if they're good or bad drug lords.

[Flaneur]

11. The US is now going to murder criminal suspects in a foreign country?

We've got a lot of nerve, don't we? What's that old saying about blowback?

[maddezmom]

12. kick

[sabra]

13. U.S. Military Working to 'Kill or Capture' 50 Taliban Drug Lords

Source: ABC News

Senate Report Says New Obama Administration Strategy Includes 'Assassination' Hit List

In a dramatic change of policy ordered by the Obama administration, the U.S. military has been given approval to "kill or capture" 50 Taliban-connected drug lords whose names are on a classified "kill list" being circulated to commanders, according to a report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and obtained by ABCNews.com.

Military officials expressed anger today that the "classified program" had been revealed in the Senate report.

A Department of Defense spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to comment on the target list, but said "where terrorists do interface with drug networks that produces a security threat, a force protection threat, and is a legitimate target in those regards."

Senate investigators were told military commanders have been given, for the first time, the green light to "remove from the battlefield" the 50 drug lords on the kill list, which also includes another 317 Taliban and al Qaeda figures.

U.S. military commanders told Senate investigators that their classified rules of engagement and recognized Law of War "have been interpreted to allow them to put drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency" on the kill list, called the "joint integrated prioritized target list."

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8295405&page=1

[teranchala]

14. So how many "number two" guys do they have?

Billions and billions, probably.
:shrug:

[Peace Patriot]

15. The Aghanis must be making serious in-roads into the Bush Cartel/CIA drug networks. nt

[SpiralHawk]

16. Bingo

you got it.

[Javaman]

17. So are they going to issue a new deck of cards?

sigh. same as it ever was.

[classysassy]

18. Why are

trying to stop drug traffic over there,when we can't stop it here?

[EFerrari]

19. Why?

[mbperrin]

20. How quickly they forget. Taliban is anti-drug, not pro.

Little reminder from the past:

http://www.opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.


Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

more at link

[maxsolomon]

21. they're currently taxing the trade to fund their operations

offer the growers double what the drug smugglers pay to sell the poppies to NATO. it's not like we don't use it for palliative care.

releasing the list sounds to me like they're trying to engender some cooperation.

[XXXMADAM]

22. US puts Afghan drug lords on hitlist to disrupt Taliban finances

Source: CLG - Lori Price

Drug traffickers will now be given the same target status as Taliban leaders by US forces.

Fifty Afghans suspected of drug trafficking and having links with the Taliban have been placed on a US target list to be captured or killed as part of a significant shift in Washington's counter-narcotics strategy, it emerged today.

US commanders, who described the move as essential to disrupting the flow of drug money helping to finance the Taliban, told Congress they were convinced that the policy was legal under the military's rules of engagement and international law, the New York Times reported.

The move will be disclosed in a report this week by the US Senate foreign relations committee. "This was a hard sell in Nato," General John Craddock, Nato's supreme allied commander until he retired in July, the Times reported.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/10/us-policy-drugs-afghanistan-taliban

---

This is further evidence of the recent anger by CIA Leon Panetta when the media reported he was mad because Cheney's CIA said not to tell Congress about plans to kill Al Qaida terrorists.

I wonder how Panetta feels about this new hitlist to kill drug dealers? Will it catch his "hair on fire", racing in to tell the Intel committee immediately as he did before?

xxx
http://fbicorruption.250free.com
http://www.defraudingamerica.com/robin_head.html

[notesdev]

23. Is that before or after

the giveaway of millions of dollars to opium poppy farmers there?

[sofa king]

24. The CIA must not want the competition.

[earcandle]

25. This is how we are going to steal their cash crop used in the pharmaceutical fields?

[JCMach1]

26. Yeah, cutting into CIA profits...

[midnight]

27. Maybe they should read Gary Webb's research on US drug

connections.