(CROSS POSTED, W/OUT ANY OF THE REFERENCE LINKS, FROM MY NEW BLOG: AID & COMFORT)
This week America’s 44th Commander in Chief will closet himself with the brass buttons and bow ties in order to formulate a plan for winning war in Afghanistan. A goal never before achieved in history. A goal that eluded America’s 43rd Commander in Chief in nearly seven years of filling body bags with American children.
Appropriately, (I guess), President Obama has selected a veteran of Southeast Asian Vietnam diplomacy, Richard Holbrooke, to save the day in southwest Asian Afghanistan. Vietnam, that sent home to America a generation of addicts vs. Afghanistan where opium funds the Taliban thanks to Richard Nixon’s other dirty little war, the Drug War. Proving, if nothing else, that the more things change the more they stay the same.
While lamenting the need for more and more and yet even more U.S. boots on the ground in in an Afghanistan “surge” the New York Times Week in Review this week, in a column titled Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan, offers our new president the suicidal and fatalistic advice of Rudyard Kipling, “Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains…”. Conventional wisdom considering the ignoble history of Afghan invaders.
But on the same day that the New York Times encourages our president to leap from the pedestal of great expectations for change that Americans have raised him up onto the Washington Times actually offered Mr. Obama some advice for real strategic change that can deprive America’s enemy, the Taliban, of significant cash flow. According to military strategist John R. Glaze report to the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, “Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy”(PDF), “…an estimated 70 percent of the Taliban’s income now comes from protection money and the sale of opium.”
The Washington Times editorial, Obama’s challenge in Afghanistan, citing an Op/Ed their paper published early in January by Professor James Nathan of Auburn University-Montgomery, recommends that the Obama team look at buying the opium crop from Afghan farmers as a means of depriving the Taliban of money while winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan farmers. “It deserves further study,” the Washington Times opines, “as it may be the only feasible answer.” America’s deep pockets would make it easy for us to outbid the Taliban for the entire crop.
For a couple of years now the private think tank, The International Council on Security and Development, has been promoting just such an idea. Their report Poppy for Medicine outlines a program that would have both the growing and medical morphine tablet production remain in the local Afghan villages would provide vital developmental economic opportunities for that agrarian culture that today is caught between the economic desperation, the Taliban’s violent doctrinaire coercion and western military force.
But getting control of the opium production is only half the battle after decades of Afghan heroin being used by alQaida as an asymmetric weapon against us. As Sen. John Kerry told reporters in 2001 as the World Trade Center and Pentagon still smoldered: “That’s part of their revenge on the world,” Kerry said. “Get as many people drugged out and screwed up as you can.” 21 Sept. 2001
alQaida and the Taliban have attacked the west through the veins of our children with great success fueling a population of addicts that numbers literally in the millions around the world. These damaged people will not simply disappear nor will they suddenly become patriots to some new Obama paradigm. In order to fight the problems created in practically every nation in the world by this failed U.S. War on Drugs morphed into the War on Terror policy, Obama, and the United Nations too, will need a new perspective on addiction to go along with a new strategy in Afghanistan. They will need to turn away from viewing addiction and drug abuse simplistically as crime and instead adopt a science and public health based perspective of addiction and drug abuse as the diseases that they are.
Switzerland adopted this perspective in the early 1990’s, treating hard core heroin addicts with therapy and heroin prescription programs with great success at reducing both the addict populations and the crime that addicts depend upon for economic sustenance. Swiss heroin model reporting benefits