RAND's commentary "Afghanistan's Local Insurgency"

[kaur]

http://www.rand.org/commentary/013107IHT.html

[Stan]

The lesson for the United States and NATO is stark. They will win or lose Afghanistan in the rural villages and districts of the country, not in the capital city of Kabul. And if they are to win, they must begin by understanding the local nature of the insurgency.

Thanks for the Link Kaur !

I have now rotated six times with our HDO missions, and can say this is indeed reality there. Our units meshed well and we even had a sauna party with the locals - worked extremely well. If the locals give, the rest will follow suit.

Regards, Stan

[kaur]

Here is link to Rand's publication.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies...RAND_CT276.pdf

After little bit more than 5 years of action in Afganistan the Pakistan question is still unsolved

Here is map of Pushtu tribes to illustrate the situation.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._ethnic_80.jpg

This Pakistan question reminds me question from Rumsfeld's letter form 2003.

"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...1016sdmemo.pdf

[goesh]

Re: opium production and involvement of clerics/mosques/schools in delegitimizing production.

This presupposes dimished demands for the product. The analogy is our own inner city dealers and their mules. One good afternoon on the street corner pays more than 6 months of working full time at McDonalds. I wonder how a small buy-out program would work instead? How much does the opium farmer actually make? We pay our own farmers not to produce, so in principle couldn't their opium be bought at fair market value then later burned? (the troops staying upwind during the burning phase of the operation of course) I don't have the answer, I'm just throwing out an idea here.

[tequila]

Having seen the dope trade intimately during my upbringing, I will attest to the fact that most street level dealers do not make much money. It is very much a boom-bust business at the street level. A good afternoon can make $300-500, but far more often are the $25-80 days, where the takings have to be split among an entire shift crew. Of course this seems like great money when you are 12-14, but things change as one ages.

The real money is always made at the mid and upper levels.

[Stan]

Hey Goesh,
I like your idea, and coming from a family with farmers in PA I even somewhat understand the related scenario. But if we per se bought it all tomorrow and subsequently created a market crash , would we end up eventually with even more around as 'suppliers' spooled up ?

Much like Tequila, I spent my youth in DC and Suitland, MD (as a snow-white boy) watching the drug trade in the staircases at school and on the streets in the evenings. The little man in the food chain made what amounts to jack and was all to often the one caught.

Let's take the problem out at the roots...I prefer napalm

[John T. Fishel]

While I have a lot of sympathy for the notion of paying not to produce opium, we have a great deal of experience with similar programs for coca leaf in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. The problem is that farmers take the money, destroy the crop in the fields, and grow another crop in fields that were not covered by the agreement. The reason is, that demand for the product remains high enough to make it worthwhile to circumvent the intent of the program.
Conceptually, what works is to identify the current "center of gravity" and attack it. In Bolivia in 1986, this was the drug lab where coca paste was converted to base or cocaine. Attacking the labs caused demand to drop temporarily and the farmers were then receptive to the idea of planting alternative crops.
A lack of political will in both the USG and the Bolivian government caused the attack on the labs to subside and incorrect analysis changed the focus so that demand rose again. In addition, the center of gravity shifted away from the centraized drug lab. Still, the lessons of Operation Blast Furnace should be/have been learned.

[carl]

I would like to suggest that the only realistic way out of this problem is the legalization of drugs.

We turn ourselves inside out trying to stop the importation and consumption of drugs which, I believe, is impossible. It is in human nature to want to make things better in an easy way, drugs do that, at least in the short term. A substantial portion of our people don't see anything wrong with drug use and their minds probably can't be changed. From an economic standpoint, the object of stopping drug use is to retain the full economic potential of drug users. From personal observation, I don't think drug users have much to contribute economically anyway.

The situation now provides a lot of money to people who would do us harm and gets a lot of people killed (Columbian policemen etc.) who don't really have much to do with our problem. If we legalized drugs, we would deprive terrorists and criminals of money they use to hurt us and our allies.

The details of which drugs and how much and when; questions like that are to be left for later. I am interested in what you guys think.

Let the condemnation begin.