Fighting Afghanistan's Opium Dependency as a Means of Disrupting al Qaeda's Illicit Funding

Afghanistan supplies 87 percent of the global opium product, and terrorist organizations are using the narcotics trade to fund their operations. The nascent Afghani government has a limited capacity to combat this problem without significant assistance from the U.S. and its coalition partners. This book examines the question: Is the current model of inter-agency counter-drug cooperation sufficient to rid Afghanistan of its opium dependency and disrupt one of al Qaeda’s main sources of funding? To help answer this question this book will review the current coalition, joint and inter-agency counter-narcotics strategy, and in doing so will try to ascertain if there is a more efficient and effective model for inter-agency coordination as it pertains to counter-drug operations. Finally, this book will study the role of special operations forces in counter-drug operations through the historical model of the Latin American counter-narcotics strategy and how special forces, in particular, can be used to a greater extent in the counter-drug role in Afghanistan.