Foreign Policy magazine this month features an article entitled “Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade“, which is a decent overview of the opium problem – as far as it goes. Unsurprisingly, however, in doing so, it proverbially ignores the elephant in the room, and in doing so represents part of…
U.S. government documents shed some additional light on repeated Taliban offers to hand over Osama bin Laden.…
Many analysts have postulated that President Obama's canning of Gen. Stanley McChrystal was compelled in part by a desire within the administration to shift the Afghanistan policy.…
McChrystal confronts the specter of a collapse of United States political support for the war.
The Washington Post reports today that "The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure save passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators."…
In November 2008, I wrote: The question still remains of who is really responsible for the lion’s share of the highly profitable Afghan opium trade. Mr. Pietschmann [of the UNODC -- see link above for full article] suggested a role of Kurdish groups in trafficking the drug from Iran into…
The New York Times has an illuminating article regarding the opium trade in Afghanistan. The title is “U.S. Turns a Blind Eye to Opium in Afghan Town“, and it begins (emphasis added): The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders…
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has reappointed Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum as his chief of army staff. General Dostum, for those who don’t know, is “one of the most ruthless warlords” in Afghanistan, and as a member of the Northern Alliance, a U.S. ally and likely C.I.A. asset in the…
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has reappointed Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum as his chief of army staff. General Dostum, for those who don’t know, is “one of the most ruthless warlords” in Afghanistan, and as a member of the Northern Alliance, a U.S. ally and likely C.I.A. asset in the…
Zarar Ahmad Moqbel has been appointed by President Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics minister. British officials are reportedly “dismayed” at the appointment, since they lobbied to have him removed from his post as Interior Minister in 2008 for his alleged involvement in corruption. Reports the Telegraph: The interior ministry, which…
Earlier this month, the Taliban offered what was essentially a guarantee to prevent the return of Al Qaeda to Afghanistan in return for a withdraw of foreign troops. As Anand Gopal reported in the Wall Street Journal: The Taliban said in a statement Saturday they would provide a “legal guarantee”…
Outlining his rationale for the decision to send yet more troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama on Tuesday began with a familiar refrain: “We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people.” “Al Qaeda’s base…
In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul responds to charges that he supports terrorism, discusses 9/11 and ulterior motives for the war on Afghanistan, claims that the U.S., Israel, and India are behind efforts to destabilize Pakistan, and charges the U.S. and its allies…
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which has been widely touted as a sharp break from that of his predecessor’s. Judging from commentary in the media, Obama has ushered in a new age…
Dafna Linzer writes at Propublica that the review process for detainees at Guantanamo is “painstakingly slow”. She also writes this little tidbit of information: Officials with knowledge of that work said it has become complicated by a federal court ruling in April to give some detainees held by the military…
The New York Times reports: The Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops. “The Western policies against the opium…
U.S. President Barack Obama met this week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, while another U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan resulting in dead civilians set the tone for the visit. U.S. bombings in the Farah province of Afghanistan on Monday resulted in a large number of…
The New York Times reported this week that the Taliban have cut back on poppy cultivation and is stockpiling opium, grossly overstating the group’s role in the Afghanistan drug trade. “Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years,” the Times reported Thursday, “that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling…
Both the Democratic and Republican U.S. presidential candidates have stated their intention to increase the military presence in Afghanistan should they win the election to become the country’s next Executive. As a recent article in the Washington Post observed, “The well-advertised differences between John McCain and Barack Obama on the war…
While the U.S. presidential candidates both suggest an increase in military forces as the solution for the conflict in Afghanistan, U.S. allies, and even the U.S. Defense Secretary, have agreed that a political solution involving engaging in diplomacy with the Taliban is necessary. Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan,…
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