Cross-posted from Aid & comfort blog. Original has links to referenced materials.
Drug Warrior Obama’s Failure Plan for Afghanistan
In a column so mis-titled as to be delusion, “Worldview: Signs of hope in Obama’s Afghan plan”, Philadelphia Inquirer opinion columnist Trudy Rubin is fawning over her Drug Warrior President Barack Obama’s latest war-mongering escalation. Or rather the new Afghan strategy of “much, much more” of the same. Rubin can’t help herself. She is shilling for the Democratic Party. When you are a Philadelphia ‘liberal’ you shill for the Democrats no matter how stupid that makes you look. No matter how right-wing and authoritarian the Democratic Party has become in the last four decades.
Central to any Afghan policy is the opium crop. In his October 2007 report to the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute military strategy expert John A Glaze asserted that: “…an estimated 70 percent of the Taliban’s income now comes from protection money and the sale of opium.”
Foreign policy and Afghan expert New York University Professor Barnett R. Rubin in September 2006 told the U.S. Senate foreign Relations Committee: “The international drug control regime, which criminalizes narcotics, does not reduce drug use, but it does produce huge profits for criminals and the armed groups and corrupt officials who protect them. Our drug policy grants huge subsidies to our enemies.”
Since then nothing has been done by the U.S. government to address this significant foreign and military policy issue.
Ms. Rubin asserts in the Inquirer that Obama’s Afghan Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s alternative crop development is just what is needed. This is where the delusion sets in. This solution is less than putting a band-aid on a gaping head wound. It is ludicrous in its simplistic ignorance. In Colombia crop substitution, under the guise of Plan Colombia since 1999, has led to an increase in the coca crop and new production areas have grown in other Andean countries since its inception. Beside the fact that these programs, on their own, have no real alternative economic viability versus the profits provided by illegal crops, crop substitution programs address neither the supply side on-the-ground economics of the agrarian culture in Afghanistan nor does it do anything about the demand side issue of a global population of millions of addicts who continue to provide both economic and tactical opportunity for terrorists groups like the Taliban and alQaida. Not to mention the existing addict population representing an army of drug dealers working for cartels, gangsters and terrorists and selling to new generations of the world’s children.
Solutions
There are two realistic solutions that would address most if not all of these issues. Drug War supporting government, such as the Obama administration in Washington and the drug war leadership at the United Nations, just say no.
- Afghanistan. The Poppy for Medicine program proposal developed by the International Center on Security and Development. This program would give farmers with few crop opportunities in the impoverished land of Afghanistan a crop that they know and can grow under the stressed conditions that they find themselves in. Creating local small industry for manufacturing medicines for greater distribution in the third world would keep much of the profits in the community and deprive the Taliban and criminals of the profits.
- The addict population. The Swiss have been working with a heroin prescription program since the early 1990’s with great success at taking existing addicts out of the economic paradigm of being drug dealers and fulcrums of crime in their community. In other words depriving the gangsters of their dedicated street dealer sales force.
Between them these two programs would significantly alter the failed prohibition economics of the situation in Afghanistan and around the world. Drug war proponents ‘just say no’.
