Pubdate: Sun, 23 Dec 2007
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: B07
Copyright: 2007 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Jim Hoagland
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?208 (Environmental Issues)

POPPIES VS. POWER IN AFGHANISTAN

The power to destroy does not carry within it the power to control. A 
century of failed colonial rule and the American misadventure in 
Vietnam etched that lesson on global consciousness for a time. It has 
taken the huge problems that affluent, nuclear-armed nations are 
encountering in the miserable ruins of Afghanistan and Iraq to drive 
it home anew.

Call it the paradox of overwhelming but insufficient force. It is 
surfacing in a struggle in Afghanistan over the wisdom of chemically 
eradicating that nation's expanding poppy fields. They are the source 
of (1) the livelihoods of many Afghan peasants, (2) a record flood of 
heroin into Western markets and (3) funding for the Taliban and other 
terrorist forces.

William Wood, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, has pushed so 
aggressively for aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields that he 
has been nicknamed "Chemical Bill" by NATO officers serving there. 
President Bush posted Wood to Afghanistan after he oversaw a large 
eradication-by-air project in Colombia, with mixed results.

Wood's priorities have divided U.S. and Afghan policymakers. 
President Hamid Karzai's government fears both environmental damage 
and the radicalizing political effect that a spraying program might 
have on the peasants Karzai is trying to coax away from the Taliban. 
For the moment, Karzai has gained the upper hand over the State 
Department's narcotics bureau in this ongoing fight.

The argument over how abrupt and how harsh the anti-drug campaign in 
Afghanistan should be is in fact part of fundamental disagreements 
over strategy within NATO. Many alliance officials fear that an 
approach they term as "with us or against us" and which seems to 
emphasize firepower over reconciliation is proving to be unsustainable.

I first heard rumblings of this larger debate in London in October. 
It has now been settled, at least as far as the British are 
concerned. Speaking to Parliament on Dec. 12, Prime Minister Gordon 
Brown endorsed Karzai's campaign to get midlevel Taliban operatives 
to lay down their arms and seek reconciliation. Brown also outlined 
an expanded development program targeted on the poppy-growing countryside.

The State Department's spray-first, reconcile-later tactics have 
created divisions even within the Bush administration. Like the 
British, the Pentagon is wary of abruptly destroying crops in areas 
where there is little government control and no alternative 
livelihoods immediately available.

"Spraying is not a long-term strategy," Defense Secretary Robert 
Gates told a group of foreign officials in a private meeting some 
weeks ago, according to notes taken at the meeting by a foreign 
diplomat. Gates emphasized that he was stating his view, not settled 
administration policy.

A long-term strategy involves convincing Afghan farmers that they can 
find alternatives to growing poppies, Gates continued. For him, the 
immediate focus has to be on preventing the corrosive effect of 
drug-financed corruption seeping deeper into the Afghan government -- 
to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a narco-state that would fund 
world terrorism in the way petro-states now do.

Spraying in Colombia did not diminish the flow of drugs from that 
South American country. Gates and other U.S. officials credit 
President Alvaro  Uribe (and Wood's support for him) with "uprooting 
corruption in government" and keeping it from tipping into the 
narco-state category. Only in that sense could Colombia be a model 
for Afghanistan.

The West will begin to resolve the grim and massive problems that the 
international drug trade creates only when the United States and 
Europe make justice rather than vengeance the center of drug laws, 
create effective rehabilitation programs that fill hospitals rather 
than jails and curb the demand for life- and soul-destroying 
narcotics at home. Even a "successful" poppy eradication program in 
Afghanistan would be no more than a bandage on a gaping wound, while 
inflicting great damage on Karzai's government.

Afghanistan has been treated as a one-dimensional device in the 
current U.S. presidential political season. Democrats use it to 
establish that they are not pacifists, citing Afghanistan as a just 
war that they endorse in contrast to Bush's invasion of Iraq, which 
they deplore, and move on quickly. Republicans are little better on the stump.

But Afghanistan is an urgent, rapidly evolving crisis that demands 
the attention and commitment of all candidates for national office. 
So do America's overly harsh and counterproductive drug laws.

And so does the paucity of support for providing tax dollars for 
prevention and rehabilitation rather than incarceration of simple 
users. The American nation could give itself no better present in 
this season than a thorough rethinking of its war on drugs and of 
many aspects of its war on terror. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake