rssSenate’s Afghanistan Narcotics Report Released
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 11:43 am
- 5 Comments
Jim Risen broke the story in yesterday’s New York Times, but now you can read the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s full report about the narcotics problem in Afghanistan here. (PDF, sigh.) In a statement accompanying the release, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee’s chairman, comments:
“Just this weekend, General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. top military commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview that the Taliban are gaining strength and that the war is at a decisive moment,” said Senator John Kerry (D-MA.), Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “This report takes a close look at the Administration’s new counter-narcotics strategy and I hope that it will encourage a renewed national debate on the risk and rewards associated with our increasing commitment to the war in Afghanistan.”
I don’t know what Kerry’s current thinking is about the Afghanistan war — more on that soon, I hope — but that’s quite the note of caution.
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5 Comments
Comment posted August 11, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
Had our successful reconstruction/counter-narcotic effort of 02 been continued without the funding break and bureaucratic delays, we would still have the confidence of the local (now disillusioned) people, and none in central Helmand (the center of opium cultivation) would have joined the “Taliban”. Although it never gets into the media, the problems we face in central Helmand, the center of opium production, are mostly of our own making. We reduced opium cultivation by 85% in Nad-i-Ali in 02 (central Helmand with some 30,000 acres of irrigated land with traditional cash crops still being cultivated, including cotton) in that one crop year with a hand labor reconstruction effort and complete cooperation of local government and police (pre-corruption period) who made it happen with dialogue and action with the farmers. But we tend to never look back especially if it is a failure from which we might learn something.
Comment posted August 12, 2009 @ 12:14 am
You can't war your way into having people like you. We need the Peace Corps or something similar to go in there and spend money helping these people and improving their lives without trying to brute force them into becoming modern people. There's not a lot of support for this notion but everyone knows it is true.
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