How to flip the Taliban

Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the influential Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has just circulated an article titled "Know thine enemy: why the Taliban cannot be flipped."

It is by Barbara Elias, who directs the Afghanistan, Pakistan and Taliban Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. She argues that the "main Taliban leaders will never abandon al-Qaeda " because they are too invested in their Islamic identity and that more moderate leaders have no chance of replacing the hard core Islamists because "Pakistani intelligence services will not support governments in the tribal areas or in Afghanistan that do not help it in its campaign against India."

It sounds credible enough until one stops to consider that in the entire article she never once mentions the drug trade out of Afghanistan.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda cannot be taken seriously as Islamic, for they are both up to their necks in the entirely un-Islamic drug trade, Also, they have done more damage to Muslims globally than America could ever do. It is quite clear that the drug trade is what they are about, and profit their only motive; it is the only thing that holds them together.

The real reaaon the Taliban cannot be “flipped” is that the United States cannot hope to bribe them more than what they get from exporting opium and heroin.

The only chance of winning the war against the Taliban-Al Qaeda combination is to cut off their income from drugs – and that means action against the money launderers in developed countries, especially Britain, which provides the nexus of institutional intelligence, money and elite criminality that makes illicit trafficking possible