Afghan Drug Lords Escaped Justice—But Did It Matter?
Former DEA agents contend abandonment of anti-drug program doomed Afghan war effort
AS REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS PREPARE to hold hearings Wednesday on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, former senior Drug Enforcement Administration officials say the Obama administration’s 2013 refusal to indict and prosecute the Taliban’s senior leaders on narco-terrorism charges kept the insurgency alive and set the stage for the collapse of Afghan government forces and the Taliban’s return to power.
And at least one of these former officials wants the Biden administration to correct the official record—”so that the Congress and country gets the full picture on how this debacle could have been prevented,” as John Seaman, a former DEA supervisory special agent who helped draft the plan to bring Taliban’s leadership to justice, puts it.
Seaman and Mike Marsac, the former DEA regional director for South West Asia at the time and the principal architect of the plan, contend the proposed indictments and prosecutions of more than two dozen senior Taliban leaders, along with the heads of Afghanistan’s major drug trafficking clans and associated money launderers, would have placed a chokehold on as much as $350 million a year in illicit drug money, the Taliban’s main source of funding, starving its insurgency against the U.S. and NATO-backed government in Kabul.
“By indicting them as a criminal group would have allowed us to leverage all the international police forces in the world to limit the movement of Taliban leaders, their ability to raise funds, and to hide funds in other countries,” Seaman told SpyTalk.
Moreover, he added: “we had active cooperating witnesses involved, which would have allowed us to continue investigating the Taliban and those involved after the indictments.”
The proposed indictments of Taliban leaders on drug trafficking charges were just one part of a top secret plan codenamed Operation Reciprocity, Seaman said. The plan also envisioned arresting them and hauling them before a court in New York City, where a mountain of DEA evidence would result in their convictions and imprisonment.
“Operation Reciprocity served as a key component of DEA’s initiatives and programs to break the nexus between drug trafficking, terrorism and corruption. . . to establish justice and the rule of law in the country, ” Marsac told SpyTalk.
Seaman noted the DEA and Justice Department had successfully used a similar strategy in the 1990s against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People's Army, or FARC, which produced and sold cocaine to fund their insurgency against the Colombian government. He said the indictment and conviction of dozens of FARC leaders on drug trafficking charges “exposed their criminality to the world,” weakening FARC’s hand as it negotiated peace with Colombian officials.
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