Nipping the Bud

Daily Dish sub Chris Bodenner links to the NYT report that U.S. forces seek to take out 50 Afghan drug barons.

My thoughts on Bodenner's quotations from Michael Cohen and Andrew Exum, both of whom deprecate the anti-drug lord mission:

No, we're not in Afghanistan to go "after the Pashtun Pablo Escobar." The mission of U.S. forces, according President Obama, is to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaida.

The Taliban and Al Qaida have long depended on poppy profits, their chief, or close-to-prime, source of funds - especially for the Taliban, to buy weapons and munitions, to appeal to and attract recruits, to extend their reach deeper into Pakistan, and to attack Afghan and Pakistani civilians and army and police, and coalition troops. So subtracting opium money from the enemy is a bad thing?

That said, it's doubtful that killing fifty drug lords will prevent poppy profits funding the enemy's war effort, because taking out fifty drug lords is unlikely to dissuade junior drug profiteers from stepping up into the top posts vacated by slain drug overlords (after all, risk and death have long been customary and accepted in Afghanistan's historical poppy-funded warlordism) . Taking out a few bosses won't reduce, let alone eliminate, the Taliban/Al Qaida poppy economic base.

The optimal coalition target, then, is the poppy crop. Remove the crop and Afghan government officials' corruption collapses for want of palm-grease; plus the mega-drug-dollars, which buy Taliban and Al Qaida weapons and operational depth, suddenly vanish, and deprive the enemy of a vast, hitherto dependable proportion of his funding - before he can pay to put forces in the field.

It seems quite likely that eliminating the poppy crop would spare coalition forces the casualties they'd otherwise suffer, avoidably, in head-on battle with fully-funded, well-armed Taliban and Al Qaida. Economically-compelled enemy force-reduction should also mean fewer battles necessary to defeat enemy forces in the field - the most costly way to prosecute a campaign; and yield a bonus of far fewer civilian casualties and thus advance the hearts & minds effort. More ways for coalition forces to sap and destroy the enemy's economic base, as a means of reducing his combat power and operational depth, amount to the most efficient way to decrease not only the enemy's numbers but also his weapons, munitions, transport, and appeal to potential recruits.

It's unnecessarily hazardous to U.S. and coalition troops to attempt in the middle of a war to persuade Afghan poppy growers to abandon poppy cultivation for other, less-profitable crops. It seems wiser to just destroy the poppy crop, leave farmers no option but to cultivate harmless, less-valuable crops whose smaller profits would be prohibitively costly for Taliban and Al Qaida to fleece from farmers. It's possible, if not probable, that farmers already hard-pressed to eke a living from less-valuable crops would resent, and perhaps resist, Taliban and Al Qaida skimming of slenderer crop earnings.

To take out the poppy crop is to nip the enemy's money bud. What poppy profit-ambitious, or even ideologically motivated youngster wants to fight in, or for, a force that can't meet its payroll, or arm or feed its Tali-grunts? Eliminating the poppy crop would also be poetic justice since Al Qaida's 9-11 World Trade Center attack was, by the enemy's own admission, economic warfare.