What the Senate report doesn’t answer

By Gretchen Peters

A new report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives a concise breakdown of the dramatic change, both in terms of U.S. military strategy and counternarcotics policy, toward Afghanistan since the Obama administration took office.

It’s worth a read, since it zeroes in on the "fruits of neglect" and the culture of impunity that created the problem, and because it pieces together various new intelligence and policy initiatives taking place to fight it. It also argues, correctly, for a new metric for measuring success in the counternarcotics fight and encourages the kind of rigorous debate the United States needs to be having about Afghanistan:

How much can any amount of effort by the United States and its allies transform the politics and society of Afghanistan? Why is the United States becoming more deeply involved in Afghanistan nearly eight years after the invasion? Does the American public understand and support the sacrifices that will be required to finish the job? Even defining success remains elusive: Is it to build a nation or just to keep the jihadists from using a nation as a sanctuary?

The report examines critical weak points in the new strategy, asking important questions:

Is it possible to slow the flow of drug money to the insurgency, particularly in a country where most transactions are conducted in cash and hidden behind an ancient and secretive money transfer system? Does the U.S. Government have the capacity and the will to provide the hundreds more civilians required to carry out the second step in the counter-narcotics program and transform a poppy-dominated economy into one where legitimate agriculture can thrive?

Can our NATO allies be counted on to step up their contributions on the military and civilian sides at a time when support for the war is waning in most European countries and Canada?

However on one critical issue, the report falls short.

It fails to answer — nor does it provide policy recommendations to suggest — how the Obama administration will counter high-level drug corruption among state actors in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s no doubt the narco-insurgency link must be severed, but the flip side of the COIN, not to make a pun, will be cleaning up government on both sides of the Durand Line. Insurgencies exist where good governance does not.

Noting that the vast majority of drug-related arrests in AfPak have been low-level smugglers or drug users, the Senate report says that senior officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have declared that there is "no red line" for going after senior officials proven to be earning off narcotics.

"Our long-term approach," the report quotes an American military officer as saying, "is to identify the regional drug figures and corrupt government officials and persuade them to choose legitimacy or remove them from the battlefield."

But the Senate report doesn’t say how the Obama administration plans to deal with those who resist going clean. Classified rules of engagement (ROE) have been modified to put "drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list," which is now said to include 50 traffickers.

Corrupt state actors won’t be targeted by the military under the new ROE, the Senate report says. And the ongoing wrangle over an extradition treaty between Kabul and Washington means senior Afghan officials could face little more threat than having to go through the country’s court system, which is itself riddled by graft.

Just this week, the German Magazine Stern reported that elite British troops seized tons of opium on land belonging to Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. He told Reuters that the timing of the story was meant to hurt his brother, coming as it did just a week ahead of the elections. No doubt the timing of the report is politically explosive. But British and American officials have remained curiously circumspect about the alleged drug bust, neither confirming nor denying it.

The Senate report offers no advice for how Congress can support anticorruption efforts and there has been little evidence thus far of political will in Washington to go after the big fish. Unfortunately, until that attitude changes, not much will change in Kabul either.

Gretchen Peters is the author of Seeds of Terror, How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.