mishu:
I’ve never understood why didn’t we just buy the poppies from Afghani farmers and then just destroy them. It probably costs less than our interdiction efforts over there.
I agree. Send the DEA packing and tell them never to return. They have helped make a mess of Afghanistan and even the NATO troops have said they wish they could shoot some of the DEA agents.
However, the problem is more complex because the farmers are ordered to sell to only those with the guns and the power, meaning the Taliban and any Warlord outside Taliban territory – not Karzai and his troops of the Potemkin Democracy bunkered inside Kabul when he is not visiting his good friend W at Crawford…The farmers are scared shitless to sell it to us, and will not cooperate until they are safe under national troops or a warlord. Leaving us with the choice paying them for a crop they won’t harvest out of fear, burn it and make every farmer a Taliban recruit, or let them collect it as ordered.
And we have to recognize that blocking heroin from junkies cannot be a plausible side-goal of US counter-terror policy. Only ending money to the Taliban. Assume we are somehow wildly successful after thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions we don’t have, and Afghan farmers in 2016 are growing wheat, chinese herbals and pistachios – heroin growing will just shift to another lawless nation suited for poppy like Somalia, Congo, Zimbabwe.
Also, past the Taliban, you have powerful, wealthy non-Taliban people that support the Taliban because they get and market the heroin and get billions more after markup for moving it through the international smuggling rings they have. Which depend – now, on doing what it takes to defeating Americans and Karzai’s government and keeping their Taliban supplier in business. That would be elements of Paks ISI, leaders of Pak Parties, various Pak generals, Balauchis in Pakistan and Iran that are the traditional smugglers.
Options:
1. Recruit and train soldiers and warlords who get paid more than the Taliban pays to swear fealty to the Afghan Government and act as it’s agent. Guard the farmers and their crops, which includes poppies – while the US can exercise an option to come in and buy up the whole crop and dump it on the global market, dirt-cheap.
2. Allow the soldiers and warlords the opportunity to market the heroin to others as long as the Taliban gets no cut.
3. Do as in #1, but as a phase-out over a decade if the farmers can find crops they can grow and get to market that pay more than what they traditionally get from The Horse.
4. Do like the US does to its Agribiz fatcats – pay them not to grow any poppies for 10 years and get a fat check from the US, Euro taxpayer handed out by inspectors that confirm no poppies grow in the weeks before the normal opium harvest starts.. Violators get their field burned, no compensation. But again, this requires more than a phony showcase democracy confined to a single city. This needs warloads and their troops which also, as before, need a check.
