I argued in late 05 to stop the opium eradication, as did every other advisor who was on their second or third tour back then. I don’t know exactly how command viewed us on that one, “crazy” or “lazy” is the only thing I can figure. I guess it never dawned on them if the dudes working on the ground, in the villages, who had to face the Taliban, said “knock off the opium erradication bull shit” it must mean that it is having a negative effect.

something here, just this little area, kinda’ points to a disruption of cash flow. A couple of things happened about 6 weeks ago; nobody really looked too hard into it. I don’t know if it was a blip, or if the “traditional” cash flow has been replaced with something else now. That’s all just unimportant stuff; the really important stuff of full blown forced feeding of TRADOC doctrine and paper work down the throats of host nationals continues.

Hell, I’ll tell ya what torture is, taking a host national 2IC, out of the fight and sending him to the bigger FOB for 2 weeks of poperty book school.

Also, rereading Josh F.’s post, I think it’s worth noting that hawala has nothing to do with Islamic finance. Hawala in South Asia was for many years the province of Hindu bankers (who were vilified for their money-handling role in Muslim areas much like Jews were in Europe).

You’re absolutely right that the CIA had no hand in creating hawala. Initially, I was curious if a sudden influx of large amounts of American money changed the hawala landscape. Probably, but only as portion of the significant amount of money being funneled into Afghanistan to support anti-Soviet fighters. Anyhow, most American money was filtered through Pakistani intelligence; the CIA likely used hawala when they wanted to cut out the middleman and regain some control of where the money ended up. So probably not the right question to ask.

My understanding of hawala is that it revolves around the individual connections between hawaladar, hardly a revolutionary statement. Apparently, new connections were created to funnel money to fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I wonder if those new connections were entirely new hawaladar, or were donors directed to complicit hawaladar, or were the hawaladar themselves unwitting mediums? As far as the CIA is concerned, their complicity in creating those connections was probably moral support at best.

It’d be interesting to know how exactly the Taliban use hawala. Is it just a straight money transfer where every party is knowledgeable about the source and destination? Or do they use fronts and false identities to deceive hawaladar?

If you help people grow other crops

…farmers will make far less profit than if they grew poppies. The attachment is to what good, easy money it is, even with the risk built in of going into debt if the yield is bad.

There’s very little attachment in growing opium – you buy the seeds, sell the product, and usually get into enough debt to have to keep growing opium. As far as I know, there is also a three-four month down period when you can go off and make a bit of extra money fighting for the Taliban, or whoever in the neighbourhood is willing to pay.

If you help people grow other crops (including the much-mocked pomegranate) and create small farms where they will also be able to keep goats etc, they’ll be much more attached to the land and have a sense of security that is worth defending.

This argument was made to me recently and I found it rather convincing. I’d be interested in your take on it.

Myra

Hawala is the only “bank” in most of rural Afghanistan, no surprise that people would use it for legit purposes 95% of the time and illegit purposes 5% of the time (my b.s.-stimate.) Like opium, if you shut it down without providing alternatives, it will ruin thousands of lives (think of what proportion of Afghanistan’s economy is remittances from Dubai.)

Aside from policy, Is Gates “acting as if hawala is a new problem” when the former CIA man admits that the ‘channels’ he opened probably never closed? That sounds more like confessing that we’ve been choosing to ignore an old problem, kind of like opium after 2001.