Who is buying the bombs?
As roadside bombs, or IED's continue to indiscriminately kill and maim civilians and military alike every day here in southern Afghanistan, hard questions are being asked in Washington D.C., London, and Kabul about what can be done about it.
Obviously, securing the roads by killing the bomb-emplacers has always been high on the list of strategies to counteract this threat. And coalition forces here are doing that, at a frenetic pace. But we can't be everywhere; there just aren't enough soldiers or helicopters or unmanned aerial vehicles in this country to keep eyes on every vital stretch of road. It's reminiscent of the problem we have on the U.S. border with Mexico, and we haven't figured out how to be omnipresent down there, either.
So let's look at motivation: who places these bombs and why? Is there some way to get into that decision loop and pull it apart? Word on the street is that the Taliban is paying $750 to anyone who successfully emplaces an IED that detonates under a military target, more if the destruction is caught on video.
The vast majority of these bombs are made from materials that are, in this part of the world, common household items - Nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel. That means for many young men in this region, ten minutes of hard digging could earn them as much as six months of tending sheep in the hot sun.
So where does the Taliban get the money to hire them? This is where the story gets interesting - in a sick sort of way. The Taliban here is the Afghan equivalent of the mob. Much of their funding comes from criminal activity, specifically "protection" payments extracted from local businesses and - get this - contractors who are here building infrastructure to try and drag this war-torn country out of the middle ages.
Unfortunately, these mostly-foreign firms who are here building roads, bridges, and cell towers know that buying off the bad guys is simply the cost of doing business here in the shadow of the Hindu Kush. And if one follows that money trail back one more step, it becomes apparent that at least some of the money being used to develop this infrastructure is coming directly from Western governments, including billions of dollars annually from the United States.
There is a time to build, and there is a time to fight. It may be that unless we want to fund a self-perpetuating war in Afghanistan, we may need to focus more on taking out the trash before we spend a whole lot sprucing up the place.
Stay tuned - there's more to come on how one group of special-operations warriors is doing just that.
Chuck Holton http://www.livefire.us