Drugs, Terrorists, Pipelines and Afghanistan
By Douglas Farah

Today I testified in the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the interconnectedness of terrorist and criminal organizations, especially the truly transnational groups. (You can access the testimony of the rest of the panel here.

The central point we all drove home, from different perspectives, was that of the pipeline, or recombinant chains that increasingly allow criminal to co-mingle different types of activity while merging with terrorist organizations that are becoming more criminalized.

At the root of many of the reasons for this is the absence, ineffectiveness or grossly corrupt governments in the regions where these pipelines operate. Without some ability of the government-usually after decades or centuries of absence-to convince people there is a reason to support it, the insurgencies/drug traffickers/non-state actors win by default.

The timing was interesting because the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was reiterating the need to significantly increase the number of troops in Afghanistan to fight the growing Taliban-led insurgency. The Obama administration is in the beginning of a crucial debate on Afghanistan policy.

What McChrystal's strategy cannot address is the mass corruption that has so thoroughly discredited the Karzai government and turned hope to dispair in much of Afghanistan. The perception of massive fraud (even if the fraud was only significant) in the elections may have been the final straw in the ability to generate the necessary trust in the government to make any difference.

As my fellow panelist David Mansfield noted in the hearing, while the Taliban is undoubtedly heavily involved in opium trafficking, so is the government. People expect the Taliban or other non-state actors to engage in criminal activity, in part because they are not the government.

But when the government acts as the enemy while claiming legitimacy for its actions, the population is not fooled. Rebuilding lost credibility is an enormous and time consuming enterprise. My full blog is here.
October 1, 2009 04:17 PM Link
http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/506/dr...afghanistan.com