US's Afghan policies going up in smoke

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/


In Afghanistan, the US cozies up to people it professes to be against. It attacks people whose hearts and minds it hopes to win and it pays experts to report false conclusions it wants to hear. In such circumstances, the multimillion-dollar drug-eradication program can only be a failure.
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On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry that increased poppy production could be a destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in southern Afghanistan".

That rising violence - a full-scale onslaught by the resurgent Taliban - put Afghanistan back in the headlines this summer and brought consternation to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) governments (from Canada to Australia) whose soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led to believe was a peaceful "success story".

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When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the US occupation that followed the defeat of the Taliban, poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since - this year by 60%.

Still, the counterproductive eradication program succeeds in one thing. It makes life miserable for hundreds of thousands of small farmers. What happens to them? The Senlis Council, an international drug-policy think-tank, reports that the drug-eradication program not only ruins small farmers but actually drives them into the arms of the Taliban, who offer them loans, protection and a chance to plant again. Big farmers, on the other hand, are undeterred by the poppy-eradication program; they simply pay off the police and associated officials, spreading corruption and dashing hopes of honest government.

-snip-

Now, another Republican administration sets Afghan against Afghan again in a kind of cockamamie proxy war supposedly for the souls of American heroin addicts. Since when have Republicans wanted to do anything for American drug addicts but lock them up?

This is the kind of weird "foreign policy" you get when your base is keen on the war on drugs and there's a lot of real stuff you can't talk about outside the Oval Office - or, sometimes, in it. Like, to take an example, the way the Taliban now control the Pakistani border city of Quetta, a subject that went politely unmentioned recently when Bush entertained Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and Afghanistan's Karzai at the White House.

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Before the US-and-Pakistani-sponsored mujahideen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced only a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army of occupation, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. As Alfred W McCoy reports in The Politics of Heroin, Afghan mujahideen - the guys president Ronald Reagan famously likened to "our founding fathers" - ordered Afghan farmers to grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani army transported it to Karachi for shipment overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations.

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Two years ago in Kabul I interviewed an American consultant sent by the Bush administration to assess the "drug problem" in Afghanistan. His off-the-record verdict: "The only sensible way out is to legalize drugs. But nobody in the White House wants to hear that." He admitted that the sensible conclusion would not appear in his report.

So you see what I mean about the weird policies a government such as the United States' can develop when it can't talk about real facts. When it cozies up to people it professes to be against. When it attacks people whose hearts and minds it hopes to win. When it pays experts to report false conclusions it wants to hear. When it spends billions to tear down the lives of poor Afghans even as NATO allies pray for a break in battling the Taliban so that - with time running out - they can rebuild.
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[Jeffersons Ghost]

1. kick because this got burried before people could see it

[Jeffersons Ghost]

2. K&R, still too few have read this... i guess I needed to vote it up!