On the Ground Training Afghan Counternarcotics Police

Blackwater is training Afghanistan's new counternarcotics police - the men and women on the front lines to combat both the illegal drug business and to take away a big source of funds for the Taliban and, presumably, al Qaeda.

I haven't seen anything else like it in the above video. This stuff is new. Some of the highlights are what appears to be a main lobby of Afghanistan's new Counter-Narcotics Training Academy. On the wall are painted the flags of the "nations and organizations" that made the academy possible. Look at the emblems, one by one: Afghanistan, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, United Nations, Blackwater . . .

The Blackwater logo among those flags: The Afghans and Coalition members on the ground appear to have quite a different opinion of the company, working with its people up-close, than does most of the American public.

The video shows how Blackwater is helping Afghan women integrate into the counternarcotics police; how it trains new police recruits in law and safety as well as paramilitary CN tactics; how it mentors the new police out in the field; and how it conducts live-fire exercises. These guys and women are heavily armed: they're training to go out against not only heavily armed drug gangs, but against the Taliban.

The video ends with images of some of the results of the training and mentoring: world's biggest drug bust that took place last month at Spin Bolduk, a haul so big that British warplanes had to be called in to incinerate it from the air.

Congressman Henry Waxman and others want to put a stop to such activity by putting Blackwater out of the federal contracting business.

Here's a direct link to the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YLSYosNcM8

Guess Who Trained the Afghans Who Just Made the World's Largest Drug Bust!

See those two big trenches full of burning hashish? They're part of what NATO says may be the world's biggest drug bust. Afghan counternarcotics commandos, working with the elite British Special Boat Service (SBS), made the bust this week, but not a word is in the press about who trained the local anti-drug forces.

The haul of hashish was so huge - 236.8 metric tons, or triple the previous world record for volume - that the SBS called in Harrier jump jets from Kandahar to bomb the cache, which was buried in huge covered trenches, the Associated Press reports (see photo). The hashish was worth an estimated $400 million on the wholesale world market. About $14 million of that would have gone to the Taliban.

We don't have any definitive knowledge of this case, but we do know that Blackwater runs a major program for the US Department of Defense (D0D) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Afghanistan to eradicate opium poppies and other narcotics. The Afghan national police entity under Blackwater's assistance is called the Narcotics Interdiction Unit (NIU). The approach is not to eradicate crops and thereby harm local farmers and force them into the arms of the Taliban, but to wait until the farmers are paid and the raw materials are initially processed for smuggling abroad, and then destroy the processed drugs.

Did Blackwater train the Afghan special police members behind the world record-setting raid? An enterprising journalist or congressman could find out easily if they wanted to.

Mag Describes Blackwater's Fight Against Heroin Trafficking

With so much attention focused on Blackwater's private security contracting work for the State Department, it's understandable that few people know about the company's other activity - including its leading role in fighting heroin and opium production and trafficking in Afghanistan.

Faced with out-of-control narcotics production in Afghanistan, NATO and the United States have relied on several contractors - especially DynCorp, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater - to make the fight more effective. The US Army photo above illustrates how civilian contractors work directly with the military and with Afghan civilians. Blackwater is working for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the US military, according to a cover story in the March-April issue of the industry magazine Serviam.

The magazine describes a "five-pillar" counternarcotics strategy for the country, and shows how Blackwater helped set up Afghanistan's elite Narcotics Interdiction Unit (NIU).

“We’re involved on DoD side,” Jeff Gibson, vice president for international training at Blackwater, tells Serviam. “We interdict. The NIU surgically goes after shipments going to Iran or Pakistan. We provide training to set up roadblocks, identify where drug lords are, and act so as not to impact the community.”

The article is long and contains several sidebars, so it's worth visiting the original piece for the full story. Here's a representative snippet:

NIU police cover a cross-section of Afghan society. Their faces reflect the diverse racial and cultural makeup of the country. About 10 to 15 percent of NIU personnel are women: a cultural step forward in local terms, as the women work side-by-side with the men. While the women wear traditional scarves to cover their heads, they do not cover their faces unless wearing black balaclava masks to shield their identities while on an operation, or voluntarily wearing burqas to go undercover.

Once out in the field, the NIU graduates show the same determination they displayed in their training.

“About a year and a half ago they lost two officers in an ambush,” Gibson says. “They got intelligence on a drug lab outside of Kabul. Two officers went out to verify the source, but it was a setup and they were ambushed and killed.

“We believed that this unit was becoming more effective and that the ambush was a backlash. We were concerned that the Afghans would say, ‘Screw this, we’re not going to do it any more.’ But they got energized and they became stronger, and much more proud of what they were doing. It steeled their determination,” the Blackwater
international training chief says. “I thought guys would quit or not show up, but instead they put more purpose behind it.”