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InvisibleGreen_T
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Obama and the Afghan Narco-State
    #9727708 - 02/03/09 09:50 AM (14 years, 11 months ago)

I've always said the best and cheapest way to strip the Taliban of their opium funding is to pay the farmers for their opium (buying the whole crop at production level cost), thus reducing the Taliban supply. Now I have an academic who agrees with me!
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Source: Kuwait Times

OBAMA AND THE AFGHAN NARCO-STATE


To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two statistics.  One is Afghanistan's ranking on an international index measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries.  ( Somalia is 180th ).  The other is Afghanistan's position as the world's Number 1 producer of illicit opium, the raw material for heroin.  The two statistics are inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan, to write: "Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail.

Holbrooke, who was not in government service at the time, took particular issue with the counter-narcotics strategy the Bush administration pursued in Afghanistan.  "The ...  program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective policy in the history of American foreign policy," he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.  "It's not just a waste of money.  It actually strengthens the Taleban and Al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.

Exactly what the Obama administration intends to do about that, and how it might break the narco-state, has yet to be articulated.  Sending more troops to fight a growing insurgency does not necessarily translate into progress towards dismantling the "narco-state," eliminating corruption or cutting down on the opium production whose proceeds help finance the Taliban.

The counter-narcotics strategy Holbrook criticized so harshly centers on the eradication of drug crops, and has been the main weapon in the "war on drugs" the United States has been waging for decades around the world.  That war failed to curb the production of illicit drugs and often proved counter-productive.  In Bolivia, for example, Evo Morales, a left-wing opponent of the United States, rose to political prominence and finally the presidency because he rallied a protest movement against US-sponsored attempts to wipe out the cultivation of coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine.

De-emphasizing eradication in Afghanistan would amount to an implicit admission of the failure of policies pursued since the 1970s by both Democratic and Republican administrations.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, described Afghanistan as "our greatest military challenge right now" but said there could be no purely military solution - not even with the additional 30,000 troops Obama plans to dispatch over the next 18 months.

So if there's no purely military solution, what are the chances of progress on the political front? An unnamed White House official sounded hopeful this week that the United States could push Afghan President Hamid Karzai into extending government control beyond the capital and stepping up the fight against corruption.  It is the same Karzai who declared jihad ( holy war ) on the drugs trade in 2004, a few days after he was sworn in as Afghanistan's first democratically elected leader.  That holy war made no dent in opium production and corruption blossomed.

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle," Thomas Schweich, a former top anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, wrote in the New York Times last summer.  "The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the US and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

In other words, Karzai is not part of the solution, he's part of the problem.  As to solutions: One novel idea on opium-and-corruption comes from James Nathan, a political science professor at Auburn University in Alabama and former State Department official.  He argues in a forthcoming paper that the most efficient way to tackle the problem would be for the United States or NATO to buy up the entire Afghan opium crop.

Purchasing the whole crop would take it away from the traffickers without cutting more than half the economy of Afghanistan," Nathan said in an interview.  "Such a purchase would directly confront Afghanistan's most corrosive corruption.  It would end the Taliban's money stream." And the cost? By Nathan's reckoning, between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year, no pocket change but not a large sum compared with the around $200 billion the US taxpayer has already paid for the war in Afghanistan.  The idea may sound startling but its logic is not far from the farm subsidies paid to US and European farmers.

On a more modest scale than Nathan's buy-it-all idea, a European think tank, the International Council on Security and Development ( ICOS ), is lobbying for an alternative to traditional counter-narcotics policies dubbed Poppy for Medicine.  That involves granting international licenses to poppy farmers in Afghan villages, where the crop would be turned into opiate-based medicines such as morphine or codeine, and then shipped out to the legal market.

It would place Afghanistan alongside Turkey ( where the United States helped to introduce a similar program in 1974 ), India and Australia as legal producers of opium.  Could it work? When ICOS, formerly known as the Senlis Council, first came up with the idea, the State Department cold-shouldered it.  But that was before Obama, who promised to listen to new approaches.  Both the buy-it-all and the licensing concepts deserve a hearing.


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"I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson

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Offlinesixletterscurvy
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: Green_T]
    #9727938 - 02/03/09 10:51 AM (14 years, 11 months ago)

Just something to consider..

The taliban and the "terrorists" are hyped too much by pubic media, which influences documents like this. The truth is that yes Afghanistan is the worlds largest producer of opium (i.e. heroin), responsible for more than 95% of the worlds supply.

So the US and NATO are FIGHTING the taliban to stop the growth of opium which they say funds the taliban?

Wrong.

Before the US and NATO entered this conflict, the taliban had eradicated most major opium operations and the country was hardly producing at all. This was a BIG problem for the US. They entered Afghanistan to stop the taliban, yes, but to stop them from stopping opium production, which they were banking on, via NATO.

The spokesperson for the Russian president has been happy to express these views and support these claims with evidence of US led NATO troops exporting the opium on military vessels. He blames Russia's more than 50% male herioin-addicted population on the US as well, citing it as the major catalyst in Afghanistan's opium production, which has skyrocketed since US occupancy.

You can call it Vietnam #2. Except maybe the CIA isn't in charge this time, that I can not speak to.

Buying all the opium up just seems like an idea to do what their already doing, but in the ok eyes of the public.


--------------------
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
-HST


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Offlineclover606
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: Green_T]
    #9727942 - 02/03/09 10:52 AM (14 years, 11 months ago)

why dont we just buy all the opium and process it into medicine ourselves, and then sell the processed chems to other nations?initial cost of 3 billion for the harvest and another half billion for processing, and bam, then the taliban is poor and america makes 10 billion dollars selling painkillers to europe and canada


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grassman said:

I remember being in DARE when i was much younger and some of the stories they would tell you are not only ridiculous, but completely untrue. One story was that a woman was on LSD and thought her infant was a turkey so she baked it in the oven. Now I look back and think thats hilarious, but at the time I guess it scared me.


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InvisibleGreen_T
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: sixletterscurvy]
    #9728092 - 02/03/09 11:34 AM (14 years, 11 months ago)

Six letter:

I think you may have some facts jumbled up. It is true the Taliban curtailed opium poppy production, due to their strict Islamic code. With the Taliban ousted, poppy production lept back up to alarming levels. This is not due to the CIA trying to make a profit off it, but rather the "opium police" were removed. Now the Heroin trade is controlled by local war lords. Is there corruption involving American and Afghani officials? Certainly. But this isn't the motivation behind more poppy production; they are merely taking a cut.

Afghanistan is a rugged and mountainous country. The terrain makes accessibility near impossible, and as such there are many isolated pockets of people in various regions, controlled by the war lords. A few of these war lords still support the Taliban, and they are the ones giving them their heroin profits. The CIA isn't flying around to these various pockets and telling people to grow opium. Their local government is doing it, and perhaps colluding with a few corrupt US and Afghani officials.


--------------------

"I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson

Legalize Meth | Drug War Victims


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InvisibleSilversoul
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: Green_T]
    #9728266 - 02/03/09 12:17 PM (14 years, 11 months ago)

The licensing idea sounds great.  The real way to win in Afghanistan is to raise the standard of living for the people there.  Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the Taliban is able to take advantage of that poverty by providing for the poorest of the poor, much like Hamas does in Gaza.  If we can show the Afghans that they can be better off without the Taliban, then we can really win their hearts and minds.


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Offlineweephar
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: sixletterscurvy]
    #9729143 - 02/03/09 03:22 PM (14 years, 11 months ago)

Quote:

sixletterscurvy said:
He blames Russia's more than 50% male herioin-addicted population on the US as well, citing it as the major catalyst in Afghanistan's opium production, which has skyrocketed since US occupancy.





Do you have a source for that 50+% male heroin-addicted population in Russia statistic?  That number seems extremely high.  I mean not even 50% of the people in the US have even tried ganja...not saying you are wrong, just seems like an unbelievable number to try to be sensationalistic.

And yes, this is the only way to stop the supply of heroin from Afghanistan that funds the al queda or the taliban or whomever...of course then heroin coming from other places and illicit fentanyl production will skyrocket in the world to make up for the lack of heroin for addicts.  There is no way to stop drugs as long as there is demand for them...legalize, regulate and tax.


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Life is good! (and it is also a journey)

Free Rudd!


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Offlineneopet nub
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: weephar]
    #9729470 - 02/03/09 04:26 PM (14 years, 11 months ago)

Quote:

weephar said:
And yes, this is the only way to stop the supply of heroin from Afghanistan that funds the al queda or the taliban or whomever...of course then heroin coming from other places and illicit fentanyl production will skyrocket in the world to make up for the lack of heroin for addicts.  There is no way to stop drugs as long as there is demand for them...legalize, regulate and tax.




That is completely true, I forgot about that completely...


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Ego death from weed!


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Offlinesixletterscurvy
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Re: Obama and the Afghan Narco-State [Re: neopet nub]
    #9729916 - 02/03/09 05:50 PM (14 years, 11 months ago)

I never mentioned the CIA. I actually made it a point not to. I did mention Vietnam, but that's different the CIA was called out publicly for that.

As for the quote, I just spent 20 minutes looking and I cant find it dude. It was something to the effect that half of all males had tried the drug and the rate of those who tried it and became addicted was a majority. Also, it was the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan in a press release, not the prime minster sorry.


--------------------
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
-HST


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