That raid, details of which have not been previously reported but were confirmed by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, was carried out by members of a Drug Enforcement Administration paramilitary team, working with U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army counterparts.
Such raids can reap great rewards -- an opium lab was destroyed during the operation -- but they also come with great risk. Less than a week later, while departing from a counter-narcotics operation in Afghanistan's Badghis Province, a CH-47 helicopter carrying DEA and military personnel crashed, killing three DEA special agents and seven Special Forces personnel.
The deadly crash highlighted the DEA's escalating counter-drug war in Afghanistan. It also pointed to the renewed collaboration between law enforcement and U.S. Special Forces, a relationship that traces back to 1980s Latin America. The deaths marked the DEA's first losses in Afghanistan, where agents have been deployed since 2005 as part of what are known as the Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Teams, or FAST.
The FAST teams have placed DEA special agents back into the kind of paramilitary role that the agency abandoned in the mid-1990s, and renewed long-lost links between the DEA and U.S. Special Forces, according to Michael Braun, who left the DEA last year after serving as the assistant administrator and chief of operations.
Braun says the DEA's involvement in Afghanistan, though unique in some respects, is not without precedent. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the DEA ran Operation Snowcap, which involved having DEA agents trained and equipped by U.S. Special Forces. "In Latin America, it was an extraordinarily effective program that netted hundreds of tons of cocaine," Braun says. "It was actually several years ahead of its time."
That program, Braun says, was dismantled during the Clinton administration after a1994 plane crash in the Peruvian jungle killed five special agents. As a result of Snowcap's cancellation, the DEA essentially had to rebuild that capability from the ground up when the U.S. went into Afghanistan, Braun says.
Though the DEA's presence in Afghanistan has expanded rapidly and received additional funding, Kevin McWilliams, an agency spokesman, declined to confirm the precise number of special agents operating in the region, citing security concerns.
The increasing tempo of DEA operations comes at a critical time for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. In June, the administration shifted tactics in the drug war, ending the unpopular poppy eradication program, and moved more heavily into interdiction. For the DEA, the emphasis on interdiction has bolstered its position in the country, where it has been carrying out two to three missions a week.
Braun sees renewing the links between DEA special agents and U.S. Special Forces as a major success. "When you couple agents trained and equipped with Special Forces, they develop a close bond," he says. "Those Special Forces troopers who would not normally embrace another agency -- a civilian law enforcement agency -- know what they have their hands on because they trained and equipped them."
For Special Forces, the DEA agents bring something the military doesn't have: "many, many years of a very unique tradecraft honed and tempered by complex investigations around the globe," Braun says.
The current operations in Afghanistan, though not without critics, are netting large amounts of drugs. Another recent raid confirmed by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul took place Sept. 19 and yielded 800 kilograms of hashish and 50 kilograms of opium, along with IED manufacturing materials. In June, the DEA announced the results of Operation Albatross, which resulted in a record-breaking 262-ton hashish seizure.
According to figures provided by the DEA, drug seizures in Afghanistan for fiscal year 2009 included 22,508 kilograms of opium, 378 kilograms of heroin, as well as large amounts of hashish. Along with the drugs, the DEA reports finding large amounts IED-making materials and weapons -- further proof, it says, that the drug trade is fueling the Taliban's resurgence.
Getting the U.S. government to recognize and understand the link between drugs and insurgency in Afghanistan took time, says Richard Douglas, who served as Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics under the Bush administration. "I don't mean to suggest there was a lack of support," says Douglas, who praised the DEA's work in Afghanistan. "What you had was an evolution of thinking and understanding of what the DEA could bring to the table."
But critics of the current policy question whether it's really possible to defeat the Taliban through drug interdiction. "The drug trade is pervasive -- roughly a third of the country's gross domestic product," says Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute.
Carpenter says that such raids, if they can truly be directed at Taliban-connected drug rings, could be helpful, but he doubts such precise targeting is possible. "It would be rare if one had a truly clear-cut situation," he says. "The reality is that almost all political factions are involved in the drug trade."
The DEA has not released details on the specific mission that preceded the Oct. 26 crash, but according to interviews and documents, there have been numerous similar raids, such as the one that took place Oct. 19 in Kandahar Province.
"The bottom line," says Braun, "is our military is beginning to understand very clearly the important role drugs play in funding insurgencies, civil wars and terrorist groups around the globe."
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