Kerry op-ed on Afghanistan

[karynnj]

"No foreign power has remained welcome in Afghanistan for a sustained period, and the British and the Soviets paid a bitter price for trying. Our goal has never been to dominate Afghanistan but, rather, to eliminate al-Qaeda's haven and to empower Afghans to govern their country in line with their best interests and our national security.

We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that we are in anything but a race against time in a region suspicious of foreign footprints. The United States is not in Afghanistan to make it our 51st state -- but to make sure it does not become an al-Qaeda narco-state and terrorist beachhead capable of destabilizing neighboring Pakistan.

<snip>

Real progress must start at the local level. One promising model is the National Solidarity Program, which employs Afghans in reconstruction projects requested by village elders. A similar approach in Wardak province helps the district government hire tribal members as community guards.

One of our biggest challenges is eradicating narcotics cultivation, a major source of financing for the Taliban. We need to provide greater subsidies and technical assistance for farmers who abandon poppies, as we have done in Nangahar province. But we must also crack down on drug lords and reduce production, employing sustained force when necessary -- particularly in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020902096.html

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(I don't know if this will be a source of any more problem as the OP asked for it to be locked when he saw the real op-ed, but an Indian paper has significantly distorted it - to the extent that the OP of the problem thread had as his subject that JK said the Al Quaida and the Taliban should be eliminated. Here is the thread - so if anyone later claims JK wants to eliminate all of the Taliban - this post will have both the Indian article (which even gets the newspaper it was in wrong) and the WP op-ed - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5022983

The op-ed is pretty interesting

[MH1]

1. "eradicating narcotics cultivation" - sigh.

Opium is actually a valuable crop and, since it grows well there and is part of the culture, "eradicating" it is like saying you're going to eradicate coca plants from Bolivia; or eradicate marijuana plants from all US national forests. Give me a f***ing break.

Never mind that many people suffer for lack of palliative care, which could be alleviated by, guess what, NARCOTICS. Such as opium and its derivatives. Right here is the U.S. as well as in other countries. (Of course the cause of that, especially here, is much more political than because of a lack of supply).

Of course the contracts for all the opium the US plans to use are long ago given to big pharma and as part of other international political deals. Wouldn't want to upset that balance, now would we?

Sorry if I sound angry or bitter, but on this topic I am. This is an area where I disagree with JK and think he should know better. The only thing I can think is that he saw too many veterans screwed up by drug abuse, and that's blinded him to the positive side of narcotics as medicine, not to mention the questionable morality and utter ineffectiveness (in short: complete insanity) of illegitimizing the cultivation of a native plant.

I think he is right about reducing opium cultivation and helping replace poppy with food crops. That makes a lot of sense. But to draw a hard line and insist on "eradication" - meaning that any Afghan farmer who grows poppy will automatically be considered criminal, or (worse) forced to ally with the Taliban - is just wrong, and counterproductive.

Our society needs to lighten the f*** up about drugs and start using them for what they're good for, and help people avoid addiction and when that fails, treat addiction. (Unless of course the person is terminally ill and should have the right to take whatever drugs they want.) Addiction (or really, its root causes, like hopelessness, despair, lack of social guidance) is the problem, not a freakin' plant. Oh and of course the terrorism that is funded by the ILLEGALITY of drugs is also kind of a problem, I guess. But I don't think many of TPTB really want to solve that: too much money to be made off of all these "side-effects" of criminalization.

Sigh. I think JK has a start on it, and otherwise it's a good op-ed, but he has GOT to get off the "eradication" nonsense.

[karynnj]

2. Good point - but when the country is providing 90% of the world's illegal

heroin and it is corrupting the government, he is on track - and better than those who cynically allow it in places. As to eradicate - all he would need is to add the word "illicit" before heroin to meet what you are rightly saying. They could identify the farms with a combination of high quality poppy and farmer willingness to comply and create a legal industry highly controlled with all the poppies going to a drug company to process. I seriously doubt that he has a problem with legal production to produce the medical drugs needed. But, it may be that Kerry and experts think that doing this here (rather than where it is currently done) is unlikely to be adequately controlled.

Eradication of poppies to be sold to the black market is a goal and it would not be up to the US to make it criminal. That would be up to the Afghan government. Almost more important would be if it became a social taboo, which it might if there was a reasonable alternative. That might be one way to interpret what the MA woman at the SFRC meant in listing one gain of growing trees as it being consistent with their religious values. At any rate it seems heroin is damaging the fabric of governance as badly as it ravages the lives of people addicted to it.

I think everyone would prefer that the effort be on prevention and rehabilitation - but the latter has a pretty low success rate - and the former has not been all that effective. My town, like every town, has a high school drug problem. A year or so ago, a young recent high school graduate died of an overdose (I don't think heroin) at the home of a high school girlfriend 2 blocks from us. We knew the family whose home it occurred at from when our kids were friends with theirs when they were in early elementary school. Great kids, very nice, very involved parents - and the town had years of DARE programs - starting so young I still remember sitting through about a dozen Fourth grade kids reading their winning essays on why they wouldn't take drugs (including one kid saying he wouldn't because if he did he couldn't play guitar - a moment that had 60s era parents struggling to keep straight faces.) By high school, they knew more about more drugs than I ever even heard of in college in the 1960s - yet there was a known problem with them among high school kids.

In my own extended family, I have a niece, now in her twenties, who started using drugs at age 12 and whose life has likely been destroyed or at least greatly damaged by heroin. This in spite of her grandmother paying tens of thousands of dollars more than once for extended stays at rehab - and in spite of enormous support from others in the family. Now obviously there were problems that led her to seek drugs, but it is immensely sad to think of the strikingly beautiful, imaginative, charismatic girl, who regularly got awards in elementary school as the smartest kid in the grade changing as she has. (All those good qualities and the same stubbornness she had then have all helped her survive.) She has struggled to be clean - and once succeeded for a few years - but it clearly hurts her to see the very tight group of 18 cousins that she is now only vaguely connected to (though many reached out to her)- graduate high school, college, law school, write a book, get jobs, find significant others, get married, get apartments and houses - all things that were hers in the future for the asking when she was eleven. At this point, she has lost the demeanor, look and speech patterns that would identify her as a member of the middle or lower middle class - and heroin is always a hard to avoid lure.

So, I do see a real purpose in limiting the supply in the world - and providing current addicts with either methadone or controlled doses of heroin - if they choose that rather than detox. But it might slow down drastically the new people drawn in - those are lives saved. The harder it is to get, the fewer kids will even have the chance to make a very bad decision. I am not naive and I realize that I am deeply affected by my family's experience. I know that as long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. Prohibition did not work well, but unlike pot or alcohol - it is not as easy to create your own.

[MH1]

3. Doing the least harm

In my assessment, the illegality of drugs causes more harm and suffering in the world than if the drugs were legal (but controlled in some ways). Of course, when your own family or friends are more vulnerable under one policy than another, the question of "more harm" becomes "whose harm"? On a side note, I have seen the tragedy of alcoholism up close - and very close just in the last few weeks, which might be stoking my passion on this subject. I have to say that I have seen far more harm caused by alcohol addiction than from any other substance. Yet alcohol is the preferred drug of our legal system. Perhaps because it is so effective at producing fodder for the prison industrial complex?

I agree that JK would have been okay if he's said "eradicate illicit narcotics cultivation". But he didn't.

"Narcotics" is more than heroin. It includes morphine and other products with genuine medical use. Why shouldn't we cut the Afghani farmers into a slice of the medical production pie? It seems obviously to be in our national security interest to do so.

The Boston Globe ran another op-ed today that gets it right.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/02/17/wrong_front_for_the_drug_war/

Eradication is not just an ineffective strategy, but also hurts the security interests of Afghanistan and Western governments. While the United States invests $1 billion in eradication efforts each year, the Taliban profits by purchasing poppy from farmers who have no one else to sell to, and selling it to the black market. Also, the eradication policy fuels anti-Western hatred when farmers become sympathetic to insurgent groups after the US and Afghan governments burn or spray their only source of income.

The eradication policy remains in place even though it is widely recognized as a failure. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, last year called the eradication program "the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy."

A better option would be to set up a legal market for opium poppies. This has already happened in other countries, such as Tur key and India. The International Narcotics Control Board could regulate the growth of opium in Afghanistan for medical and scientific purposes. The drugs would be bought by pharmaceutical companies around the world for the production of licit drugs.

Such a program in Afghanistan would not only save the American government money and decrease the amount of drugs and money funneled through the Taliban; it would also allow the poppy to be put to good use by decreasing the production cost of drugs like morphine. Even if this model allowed some leaks to the black market, a wall with some holes is better than no wall at all.

I wish JK would have included this perspective in his own op-ed.