The Obama administration has raised the stakes in Afghanistan by expanding the war to include a full-scale attack on illegal narcotics and has authorised the killing or capture of 50 drug lords, says a report to be released today.
The report, prepared for the US Senate foreign relations committee, says US president Barack Obama has shifted dramatically from his earlier insistence that he was pursuing narrower goals than the Bush administration in Afghanistan. “The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counter-insurgency,” it says.
While Mr Obama said in February the US would focus on preventing the Taliban and al-Qaeda from re-establishing themselves and discounted any ambition to set up a “Jeffersonian democracy” in Afghanistan, his administration’s subsequent policy review called for a “comprehensive” approach to the insurgency.
The administration is not due to spell out its measures for success until September. But officials now give greater emphasis to the need to improve governance and the economy if the insurgency is to be defeated, while Gen Stanley McChrystal, the new US commander in the country, is expected to call for more resources.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published yesterday he warned that the Taliban currently had the initiative, that US casualties would remain high, and that US troops would be redeployed to protect Afghan civilians.
The Senate report adds that the US, Britain, Canada and other countries in Afghanistan increasingly see counter-insurgency and limiting narcotics as inextricably linked, and maintain that the Taliban cannot be defeated without cutting off financing by the Afghan opium industry, which makes $3 billion (€2.1 billion) a year in profits.
Two unnamed US generals in Afghanistan told the report authors the rules of engagement and the laws of war had been “interpreted to allow them to put drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list” that permits killing on the battlefield but not targeted assassination. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)