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.
The United States is now shifting to a counterinsurgency campaign that in addition to sending more troops is funding nation-building efforts and promoting alternative crops to farmers who have long profited from poppy production.
The increased DEA effort is aimed at more than a dozen drug kingpins whose networks are producing vast amounts of hashish, opium, morphine and heroin, some of which ends up in the United States.
Some of these figures belong either to the Taliban or to influential tribes allied with it, and they are assisted by international drug trafficking rings that have flourished for decades in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and nearby countries, DEA officials say.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former U.S. counter-narcotics officials said they were alarmed by the growing ties between drug traffickers and insurgents and the Afghan government's inability or lack of interest by many Afghan officials to go after them.
As hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the U.S.-led coalition was allocated to build Afghan police and security agencies, the forces were being corrupted simultaneously at the highest levels by the very traffickers they were supposed to be capturing, said Bruce Riedel, who chaired the Obama administration's interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
