US air campaign under Trump targets Taliban’s opium trade
ABOARD A B-52, Over Eastern Afghanistan — Flying at more than 20,000 feet, the hulking longrange bomber circled ominously above a militant-infested swath of Afghan territory near the rugged border with Pakistan, hunting for Taliban or Islamic State fighters who could threaten friendly troops nearby.
A ride in the cockpit on a recent 13-hour combat mission provided a rare bird’s-eye view of the Trump administration’s newly revamped Afghanistan policy of sending thousands of additional U.S. troops closer to the front lines — and more warplanes such as this one to protect them. That includes striking Taliban drug depots to cripple the group’s financial lifeline, as the Pentagon did in Iraq and Syria in hitting the Islamic State’s oil tankers and cash-storage sites.
During the Obama administration, U.S. commanders were barred from carrying out offensive airstrikes against the Taliban. Attacks had to be defensive, aimed at protecting Afghan forces on the ground; commanders complained that the conditions tied their hands and led to a stalemate. Now the gloves are off, and U.S. warplanes have dropped more than 3,900 bombs and missiles against targets in Afghanistan this year, three times as many as last year.
“These new authorities give me the ability to go after the enemy in ways that I couldn’t before,” Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said last month after ordering the new operation, codenamed Jagged Knife. “We’re hitting the Taliban where it hurts, which is their finances.”
U.S. airstrikes and Afghan ground raids over the past month have destroyed 25 drug labs in southern Afghanistan, wiping out $16 million in Taliban proceeds and throwing the group’s regional narcotics operations into financial disarray, according to military officials and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates.
Nicholson said the campaign will go on for months, as the Taliban operates 400 to 500 labs across the country to sustain the group’s $200 million-a-year opium trade. The drug money accounts for at least 60 percent of the Taliban’s income and is used to buy weapons, recruit and pay fighters and conduct operations.
With the war in Afghanistan in its 17th year, President Donald Trump’s strategy aims to drive the Taliban to a negotiated settlement. It seeks not only to squeeze the group’s opium revenues, but also to increase Afghan army offensives backed by U.S. air power, and to hold elections to enhance the Afghan government’s legitimacy.
“The Taliban have three choices: reconcile, face irrelevance or die,” Nicholson said.
Afghanistan specialists say they have heard such boasts before, and the war is still being fought. They also voiced doubts about the hit-them-in-the-pocketbook plan.
“It’s useful to impact the Taliban financially, but it may just drive production into neighboring Pakistan or Iran,” said David W. Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the war effort in Afghanistan for almost two years.
Other critics said the sharp increase in airstrikes will backfire, inevitably causing more civilian casualties and the accompanying political blowback, despite the military’s best efforts to mitigate that risk.
“If you increase the number of strikes without allocating the time, personnel and resources to preventing, investigating and acknowledging each one, you get more civilian casualties,” said Daniel R. Mahanty, U.S. program director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, an advocacy group. “It’s basic math.”
Targeting specialists at the military’s air command center in Qatar say they assembled the list of drug facilities that directly finance Taliban insurgents battling the government by examining hundreds of hours of aerial surveillance and poring over intelligence reports. Airstrikes have been carried out at night, when fewer people are near the targets.
“It was a very deliberate process,” said Capt. Ryan Pretty, an Army artillery officer who is deputy chief of the team overseeing the bombing campaign’s effects.
Watching and eavesdropping on the scurrying by drug-lab operators whose depots were not hit in the first wave offered important insights for planners drawing up the next set of strikes, helping them map out local Taliban networks.
“These strikes and the aftermath taught us a lot about the complexity of the Taliban’s narcotics operations,” said Navy Lt. William Conway, a former prosecutor in Chicago who is now a lead intelligence officer for Afghanistan at the command center in Qatar.