Pubdate: Thu, 11 Oct 2001
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2001 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: James A. Lloyd, Wrye Sententia

DOLLARS FOR THE TALIBAN

The U.S. government was funding the Taliban as little as four months ago. 
In May of this year, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the 
presentation of $43 million in cash and other aid to the Taliban. In theory 
this funding was to be used to help dirt-poor subsistence farmers to stop 
growing poppies for the heroin market.

Never mind that this was the most rabid anti-American group we had ever 
dealt with. Never mind that we were well aware that the Taliban was 
offering shelter to a range of terrorists. Never mind that this was money 
granted to a government that we do not even recognize. Never mind all of 
our basic beliefs about human rights, women's rights and liberty, this was 
the war on drugs.

I support the president in what he now must do, but in time, we must all 
ask ourselves how we will hold him accountable for what he did. Follow the 
money, indeed.

- --James A. Lloyd, Sacramento

What do the U.S. government and the Taliban have in common? Unbridled 
fanaticism.

When the U.S. government gave $43 million to the Taliban in exchange for 
the Taliban declaring opium poppy farms to be "against the will of God," 
the U.S. sought to fuel its own fanatical obsession, the "war on drugs."

Despite U.S. knowledge that the Taliban was an oppressive "rogue" regime, 
the U.S. government ignored the Taliban's systematized cruelties in order 
to push its own domestic and dogmatic antidrug agenda.

By militarizing the Taliban to punish Afghan farmers growing opium poppies 
- -- farmers desperate for a cash crop to feed their families in a country of 
decimated agricultural infrastructure -- the U.S. government may have 
indirectly subsidized terrorism. Just one more example of the drug war's harm.

- --Wrye Sententia, Davis
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