PENTAGON VOWS TO AID DEA IN AFGHANISTAN DRUG RAIDS

Military Finally Responds to Complaints From Capitol Hill

Washington -- The Pentagon, which has resisted appeals from federal
drug agents to play a bigger role in the campaign to curb
Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade, has pledged more support for
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's counter-narcotics efforts.

While the $2.3 billion profit from opium trafficking has helped to
arm the Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents in Afghanistan, the Pentagon
has long maintained that drug interdiction is primarily a law
enforcement responsibility, one that belongs to Afghan authorities
and the British troops in the NATO operation.

But Rep. Henry Hyde, R.-Ill., chairman of the House Committee on
International Relations, and other critics have urged the Pentagon to
do more, including transporting and protecting the DEA agents who are
working in the dangerous country.

In a letter Hyde received Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense Eric
Edelman wrote, "We have taken your concerns seriously and will work
more closely with DEA to make use of this important capability."

Edelman's letter arrived a day after the Los Angeles Times reported
that U.S. military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug
bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and
do little to counter organized crime syndicates.

Hyde, U.S. and U.N. counter-narcotics experts and Afghan officials
told the Times that the Department of Defense needs to target major
drug traffickers in Afghanistan, the well-known labs that process
opium into heroin, the bazaars where the drugs are sold openly and
the convoys that carry the drugs out of Afghanistan for shipment to
Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States.

In particular, the officials said, U.S. and allied NATO troops in
Afghanistan need to provide DEA agents with helicopter airlifts and
heavily armed troops to allow them to investigate major trafficking
rings and take out the leaders of the criminal syndicates.

Hyde praised the Pentagon Thursday for its vow of help.

"I welcome the support from our Department of Defense," Hyde said.
"Now we can better target the narco-terrorism which threatens
Afghanistan today."

Also on Thursday, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,
Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine (San Diego County), asked for a classified
briefing on the status of the military's counter-narcotics efforts in
Afghanistan. The hearing is set for today.

While the Pentagon and the DEA have been at odds, poppy cultivation
has exploded in Afghanistan, increasing by more than half this year.
The country now supplies about 92 percent of the world's opium, and
the bumper crop of poppies, much of it from Taliban strongholds,
finances the insurgency the U.S. is trying to dismantle.

On Oct. 12, Hyde and Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., sent Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld a letter asking for more military help for DEA,
including a formal policy that would allow drug agents to ride along
on more military helicopter missions and that would have soldiers
summon the DEA to the scene whenever they found a drug stash or operation.

Eight days later, Rumsfeld wrote that he had asked Edelman, his
undersecretary for policy, to look into it.

Nearly two months later, the Times article noted, Hyde had not
received a formal response.

Edelman wrote that the Pentagon has already been working closely with
the DEA in Afghanistan.

He said Rumsfeld authorized troops more than a year ago to embed DEA
agents and other nonmilitary counter-narcotics personnel on missions
in areas of known or suspected drug-related activity. And he said
U.S. troops have been instructed to notify DEA "regarding the
disposition of significant drug caches discovered during operations."

Edelman's letter does not make clear how the Pentagon intends to work
more closely with the DEA. Connie LaRossa Fabiano, a Pentagon
counter-narcotics official, said she could not comment on either the
new steps being taken or on the current cooperative efforts.

On Thursday, two senior U.S. counter-narcotics policy officials on
Capitol Hill said they have seen no evidence of those efforts.

"They had an ad hoc policy where the guys on the ground, a colonel
here or there, would occasionally bring DEA along. What we've been
pushing for is a more formal institutional policy," said a senior
staff member on the House International Relations Committee.

He quoted a recent e-mail from a U.S. counter-narcotics official in
Afghanistan who said he has seen virtually no cooperation between the
Pentagon and DEA in Afghanistan on tactical operations. If Rumsfeld
had ordered troops to work with drug agents, the counter-narcotics
official wrote, "It was not well known, understood or accepted."

A senior staff member on the House subcommittee on drug policy
reported similar findings: "We were told in briefings that there were
multiple times that DEA asked for help and for intelligence and it
was never honored."

Both staff members spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing
committee policies that prohibit them from discussing such matters publicly.