Documents detailing the failures of the war in Afghanistan show that the U.S. government did not have a clear strategy to counter the flow of drugs out of the country after invading in 2001.
In a November 2004 memo to then undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “with respect to drug strategy for Afghanistan, it appears not to be synchronized — no one’s in charge.”
“Other countries in the region want to get involved — Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, along with Afghanistan. Why don’t you see what you can do about that.”
The memo is one of hundreds from Rumsfeld included in the Afghanistan Papers, a tranche of government documents published by the Washington Post detailing the war’s multiple failures. Rumsfeld issued several memos asking administration officials about a plan to take on Afghanistan’s opium trade, which skyrocketed following the U.S. invasion in 2001.
He first raised concerns about the opium trade as early as March 2002, when he asked one of his subordinates to “ping” the British about intelligence “on the poppy fields and heroin problem in Afghanistan.”
In April 2002, Rumsfeld told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, “We need to get the NSC (National Security Council) working on the subject of what role we want to plan on narcotics in Afghanistan.” Rumsfeld alerted Rice in May that he approved a counter-narcotics operation with the British.
As opium production escalated in 2003, Rumsfeld asked one of his aides, “What’s happened to the crops in Afghanistan this year? What have they produced besides illegal drugs?”
Afghanistan’s poppy production rose to 152,000 acres between 2002 and 2003 — 36 times higher than the last year of Taliban rule. Poppies are the main ingredient in opioid drugs.
In 2004, Rumsfeld wanted to focus on Afghanistan’s drug trade. “Let’s get a major plan going for the drug problem in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a memo to Feith on Aug. 2.
The next day, he told officials he wanted to find out what the United States was doing and why it wasn’t doing more.
