It will also expand a U.S. program to train Afghan counter-narcotics police.
"A surge not only of military but law enforcement is exactly what we need. It is something we have always demanded of the U.S. government," said M. Ashraf Haidari, political counselor at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, who oversees counter-narcotics and national security issues.
Haidari said the new U.S. focus would allow the Afghan government to go after corrupt elements in government and the security forces, in part through specially trained and vetted Afghan narcotics police units.
DEA agents in Afghanistan will seek to cultivate informants and conduct sting operations. In battle zones, particularly in the south, they will receive military protection and support when needed.
"There are a lot of black holes in Afghanistan regarding intelligence," Harrigan said. "If the military stops a drug caravan, we want to get out there, exploit the evidence, interview the traffickers."
Many counter-narcotics officials, current and former, praised the DEA expansion, which they said they had pushed for since late 2006 but had faced seeming indifference or outright opposition from others in the Bush administration, including elements of the military and intelligence communities.
Some of these officials said that their warnings about the growing danger of the Taliban-drug trafficker alliances went unheeded in the years after Sept. 11, when America's focus on counter-terrorism and, later, the war in Iraq, took precedence over counter-narcotics efforts.
In March 2006, the DEA was given additional authorization by Congress to investigate international drug traffickers if it could show a connection to terrorism. That allowed it to target and arrest a few top traffickers in Afghanistan.
The next year, a key interagency task force recommended sending more DEA agents into Afghanistan. But DEA officials say they couldn't deploy the agents because of hiring freezes, a lack of administration support, and the Pentagon's failure to get involved in interdiction efforts or to help the drug agents already in the country.
"We would have needed State Department and White House approval and, moreover, had we sent them over, we knew we would not be able to get them into the field where they needed to be" without military support, said Michael Braun, who played a lead role in lobbying for the DEA expansion until his retirement seven months ago as its chief of operations.
