War on Drugs Goes to Africa

Steve Neavling

The U.S. is expanding its war on drugs to Africa, the New York Times reports.

Targeting areas used to smuggle Latin American cocaine into Europe, the U.S. is training an elite unit of counter-narcotics police in Ghana and plans to do so with Nigeria and Kenya.

The aggressive position in Africa is a sign that the U.S. is increasing some operations while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, according to the New York Times.

“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section, told the New York Times. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”