The post Afghanistan: NATO Claims Crackdown On Taliban Hashish appeared first on High Times.
With Afghanistan’s opium output now breaking all previous records, it seems that hashish continues to remain an important sideline for the country’s warring factions—and to hear the US tell it, it’s the ultra-puritanical Taliban that is responsible for it. A December 18 press release from NATO Special Operations Command boasts of the seizure of 34 tons of “raw hashish” (presumably meaning herbaceous cannabis) and 300 kilograms of “processed hashish” in a raid carried out jointly with the National Interdiction Unit of the Afghan police force. In other words, NATO is cracking down on Taliban hashish.
A “Taliban Drug Cache”
NATO’s Afghanistan Special Mission Wing provided air support for Afghan Counter-Narcotics Police in the raid on what was called a “Taliban drug cache” in Mohammed Agha district, Logar province. The hashish was destroyed on site in what was described as “one of the largest narcotics seizures that the SMW has supported.”
US commanders took the opportunity to portray the Taliban as a mere criminal enterprise. “First, the Taliban is not a popular insurgency,” said Gen. John Nicholson, NATO’s Operation Resolute Support commander, during a Pentagon press briefing quoted in the statement. “So we believe that the Taliban, in some ways, have evolved into a criminal or narco-insurgency. They are fighting to defend their revenue streams. They have increasingly lost whatever ideological anchor they once had.”
A second such haul was reported January 1 when commandos from the Afghan army’s 7th Special Operations Kandak conducted a night raid on a Taliban “Red Unit” compound in Nahr-e Saraj district, Helmand province. The commandos reported seizing and destroying over 1,000 kilograms of hashish in the raid, “denying $3.4 million of illegal drug trafficking revenue to the anti-government insurgency.”