Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Strategy in Afghanistan and Recent Reports by the Afghanistan Study Group and the Atlantic Council of the United States (Part I)
Statement
Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Strategy in Afghanistan and Recent Reports by the Afghanistan Study Group and the Atlantic Council of the United States (Part I)
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SEN. THUNE: The question was touched on earlier, maybe by Senator Nelson, but I posed a question awhile back to Eric Edelman, who at that time was defense undersecretary for policy about this transition of getting the Afghan economy, particularly the agricultural economy, transitioned from poppy production to some other -- some of the types of things that we can grow in this country. The climatic conditions are very, very similar there.
And I guess the question is, is enough effort being made on that level to -- to start making that transition so that we don't have to have as much of the hard power, the military, even if it's Afghan military, involved. And are we doing the sorts of things, is there enough, I guess, effort on that front to -- my impression was the last time I asked this question, the answer was no. And I'm just wondering if that's changed, if we're making an aggressive effort to try and transition their agricultural economy to more legitimate types of production?
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SEN. THUNE: Have you seen the connection between this narcotics -- the poppy production and insurgent funding and all that sort of thing going up? I mean is that a -- I know there's always been a fairly established connection there. But what's the trendline with regard to the illegitimate activity in terms of that industry and a lot of the other issues that we're fighting with regard to the insurgents?
GEN. SATTLER: It's a pretty murky picture. There's not enough evidence -- I mean, first of all we don't -- we don't know very much about how they actually fund the Taliban insurgency, either as an aggregate or in the groups, and it's not clear whether the trend is up or down, in terms of cash flow.
My -- you know, my personal inference is that that nexus is growing, and it's probably becoming increasingly important to them to fund the insurgency. But I don't have a lot of intelligence information to support that.
SEN. THUNE: That's my impression too, just from observation of media reports, that there seems to be a growing connection -- relationship between that narcotics trade and the insurgency.
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SEN. THUNE: And do you think that there's sufficient support from the government there, that they -- I was there awhile back, and again, my impression was that they know this is a problem, they're at least they -- at least verbally committed to fixing it. But are they -- do the actions follow that? I mean, are they taking the steps that are necessary to help deal with that?
MR. BOUCHER: In a general sense, yes. I think it's especially true in the provinces where we've seen big reductions and -- that have gone poppy free last year. It was -- one of the biggest factors has been the governors, and the people on the -- the governors on the ground. And there's even now a good performance fund, so the governors that achieve a decrease can get some money to spend on local projects.
So I think that remains one of the key factors, including the lack of good governance in addition to lack of security in the provinces where poppy's still a big problem. So it's something we're still working on.
SEN. THUNE: Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, my time has expired.
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