US Marines and Afghan forces uncovered and destroyed hundreds of tons of poppy seeds, opium and heroin in southern Afghanistan this month in raids that officials say are part of a shift in counter-narcotics strategy. Marines in Helmand working alongside DEA-trained Afghan police seized 297 tons of poppy seeds, 77 pounds (35 kilograms) of heroin and 300 pounds (135 kilograms) of opium in raids in mid-July. Some 1,200 pounds (550 kilograms) of hashish and 4,225 gallons (16,000 liters) of chemicals used to convert opium to heroin were also seized. Said US envoy Richard Holbrooke [2]: "This wasn't an accident. This was planned interdiction."
Michael G. Vickers, the Pentagon’s top civilian official for counter-insurgency strategy, said: "We are reorienting our counter-narcotics strategy rather significantly for Afghanistan to put much less emphasis on eradication and to shift the weight of our effort to interdiction." The new strategy will "particularly focus on going after those targets where there is a strong nexus between the insurgency and the narcotics trade, to deny resources to the Taliban."
Vickers, who was the principal CIA strategist for arming anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, also said there will be "more focus on other agricultural initiatives" in the coming year. One short-term solution being urged by senior Defense Department officials is to pay Afghan farmers not to plant poppies. (AP [3], July 26; NYT [4], July 23)
See our last post on Afghanistan [5] and the opium wars [6].
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