Word: talibans
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...report that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are now raising $500 million a year from the opium trade. What does that mean in terms of their capabilities and what they are able to do with that sort of money? It's clear that drug money is paying for the Taliban's operational costs within Afghanistan. That means that every time a U.S. soldier is killed in an IED attack or a shootout with militants, drug money helped pay for that bomb or paid the militants who placed it. Opium funding helps pay for salaries, weapons, explosives and food. The Taliban...
...Afghanistan to the war in Iraq, and in my opinion, it much more closely parallels the war in Colombia and the transformation of the FARC from a Maoist group into a criminal smuggling organization that came to control a Switzerland-size chunk of Colombia. [Many] of the Taliban commanders have lost their ideological roots and are really just in it to make a buck...
There are also areas where the Taliban is threatening farmers with dire consequences if they don't grow poppy. The opium traffickers send in merchants in the fall to prepurchase the crops, so it gives the farmers a much needed cash injection that they use to get their families through the winter. We've done nothing in the international community to provide that kind of microcredit program for licit crops. To my mind, the important thing is to really take the focus off of the farmers and to put it on the traffickers...
...helping establish security in border areas to create the correct environment for a bottom-up stability campaign at the village level. U.S. and NATO military officials, working alongside civilian officials, can work with communities to push these people out. There is no point in trying to reconcile with the Taliban - and when I say the Taliban, I mean the leadership of the Taliban. We're never going to beat the Taliban and al-Qaeda by trying to shoot them all. However, I do believe that there are many tribes living on the southern Afghanistan border that can be pulled away...
...think that we will win this war in Afghanistan and Pakistan when we make the Taliban and al-Qaeda irrelevant and offer the people of the border areas a better alternative. People want security, schools, health care. They really just want a safe place to live. To my mind, this is like an inner-city slum where there are criminal gangs terrorizing the people and cops that are on the take. We need to clean up these communities. We need to help the people of this region, and I think we'll see this situation start to turn around...