Taliban drug trade: Echoes of Colombia
By Gretchen Peters | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – As Afghanistan's narcotics trade explodes past $3 billion a year, there is concern that the Taliban is becoming another FARC, Colombia's notorious leftist insurgent group that draws much of its funding from the drug trade.
The Taliban and FARC - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - both got their start protecting peasants from corrupt governments. There's evidence both initially fought narcotics traffic but then levied taxes on the trade for much-needed cash.
Over time, the FARC began to use its soldiers to protect shipments, and took over coca factories. They forced farmers under their control to grow coca. Eventually, they became self-sufficient and set up a parallel government in their semiautonomous zone. They now earn an estimated $500 million a year from cocaine.
That all sounds eerily familiar to police and military officials in Afghanistan. "There is no question at all that the Taliban has been increasingly involved both directly and indirectly in narcotics," says Seth Jones, an analyst at the Rand Corp.
Evidence is growing that the Taliban and their allies are moving beyond taxing the trade to protecting opium shipments, running heroin labs, and even organizing farm output in areas they control. "It's reached the point where about half of the opium we seize in the provinces has some link to the Taliban," says Gen. Ali Shah Paktiawal, director of the anticriminal branch of the Kabul police.
Another senior Afghan security official says captured Taliban have confessed that most funding comes from drugs.
Afghan opium production, which mushroomed 59 percent in 2006, multiplied by 162 percent in southern Helmand Province, where Taliban ties to the trade are clearest. "People should be concerned about the FARCification of the Taliban," says a senior Western counternarcotics official, adding, "It does not take a lot of drug money to fund their terrorist operations."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited British troops in the province Monday and pledged to stay "as long as it takes" to prevent a return to power by the Taliban. British aid - $1.6 billion since 2001 - has included loans to farmer
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