Weapon caches, such as this one
found at Kandahar’s airport in 2001,
often are paid for with funds pro-
vided by opium sales.
supporting the insurgency. “We’re
not talking about a counternarcotics
strategy — that really is the Afghans’
responsibility,” Gates said. “What
we’re talking about is greater free-
dom to track down the networks of
those who are funding the Taliban.”
Entrances to underground
“It’s clear that these militants fi -
opium caches are camouflaged by
nance their activities by illegal drug
scrub brush and desert terrain.
trade,” U.S. Army Col. Jerry O’Hara,
U.S. Forces Afghanistan spokesperson,
said just a few short weeks after the
meeting in Budapest, as he announced
the successful raid in Kandahar. De-
stroying the drug cache, he noted,
took some of that funding away.
First things first
The responsibility for reducing
Afghanistan’s economic and social
dependence on the cultivation and
processing of opium poppies rests
with the Afghan government. Imple-
menting a successful counternarcot-
ics campaign will reduce funding
for the insurgency dramatically. Un-
fortunately, widespread instability
— a direct result of that insurgency The opium found in this cache was
— makes it almost impossible for marked with approximate weights.
Afghan leaders to implement a coun-
ternarcotics strategy. In a chicken-
or-egg debate of global proportions,
stabilizing the country might require
the defeat of both the insurgents and
the opium traffi ckers.
Despite the shift in NATO policy,
the mission of U.S. Forces Afghani-
stan has not changed. In coordina-
tion with ISAF, the goal still is to
conduct operations to defeat ter-
rorist networks and insurgents by
developing effective governance and
building the Afghan National Securi-
ty Force. “The U.S. military’s primary Once they are discovered by
mission in Afghanistan will continue authorities, caches are burned to the
to be security and building stability ground to render them useless.
in troubled regions,” U.S. Air Force MO
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