Afghani Poppies

In the mid-1980s, the price of heroin plummeted to new lows. This was a boon for heroin addicts and casual opiate users (if there is such a thing as casual opium use).

The drop in price was connected to the increase in poppy production in Afghanistan, which was the final theater of the Cold War, where American taxpayers unknowingly handed over gazillions of dollars to religious terrorists who were doing the bidding of the Reagan Administration.

American tax dollars poured to warlords and imams (including the now infamous Osama binLaden) who took control of Afghanistan and turned it into a theocratic state that would, with the fall of the Soviet Union, be bullied into submission by the Taliban.

The USSR and the USA were using, empowering, and enriching a tiny number of people in Afghanistan, which threw the populace into a spiralling poverty that left few options for earning a living. Opium production became a primary income for almost half the population.

Afghanistan is a nation of 30 million people.

They have been devastated over the past 25-years by all the major players in the are. First they were conquered by the Soviets, then liberated by the US-funded Taliban, then stabilized by religious fundamentalists money funnelled in from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The best part of this phase of recent Afghan history is that the economy began to stabilize. It was a cultural and political nightmare, but the economy was stable, which prevents civil war.

Sadly, the stabilization provided by the Taliban included the rise to power of religious fundamentalists who planned and carried out heinous attacks on civilians of the Western world.

The United States was now obliged to destabilized the theocratic regime we had empowered.

In 2002, we began our war against Afghanistan, and chased the Taliban out of power. We pretended that we wanted to catch the bad guys, but since the bad guys are the children of powerful world leaders and businessmen, we let them escape into the hills and find succor in the bosom of Pakistan (another of our not-very-nice client states).

We have empowered a new regime. Things aren't going well. Some of the people we failed to empower this time around have been empowered by theocrats who see the re-destabilized Afghanistan as a new market for their own profiteering.

The lack of stability has forced many Afghanis back into opium production, and into the embrace of theocrats who do not like the United States.

It is estimated that opium and heroin production account for half the current GDP in Afghanistan. The other half of the economy is supported by a combination of small markets and foreign aid (mostly foreign aid). But, when a farmer who is now growing opium goes to the market to buy a shovel, pail, and dry goods for his home, it means that opium production is supporting that market. So, if half the economy is based on growing opium and processing heroin, then some percentage of the remaining 50% is thriving because those poppy growers and heroin producers are buying equipment, clothes and food. I think this would probably mean that closer to 60-70% of Afghanistan's GDP is based on poppy farming and heroin production. The remaining 30-40% is foreign aid.

How does this war on terror in Afghanistan which has led to the highest production of heroin in history work with our war on drugs here at home?

Since the United States is the only nation funding a War on Drugs (one of our most ludicrous campaigns), and the rest of the world wants to actually control drug production and the drug-distribution industry, we are at odds with even our closest allies on this issue. Our draconian drug laws, which often cause mothers to be imprisoned for life whilte businessmen who steal billions walk free, prevent us from taking a morally feasible position on a global platform.

It seems to me that our reasons for fighting wars are misguided and our methods for fighting wars have never worked in the modern world.

It seems to me that we are not winning any wars anywhere. Not abroad, not at home, nowhere. Maybe we need to regroup.

Here's some interesting reading from a variety of sources:

Taliban Rising, The Nation, October 30, 2006

Afghan Poppy Trade, Trade Environment Database

Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban, Paradise Engineering

Canadians not keen on U.S. poppy eradication plan, Canada.com's National Post

Justice

The United States is the only first-world, the one developed nation to use the death penalty.

Our inability to legislate crime properly has burdened the American taxpayer with an enormous tax bill to house our prisoners.

This financial strain on individual citizens, and the ridiculous expense of a privatized penal system, has created a fury against the prison class.

The prison class in the United States is, primarily, under-educated, under-privileged, poverty-stricken, non-white drug users.

The prisons are not full of the people destroying American homes, families, jobs, or the very fabric of decency. No! The prisons are over-flowing with drug addicts.

The generals who ensure that cocaine makes its way across the border while confirming that bananas and rubber is being stopped, are not in prison. Jeffrey Skilling, a man responsible for destroying the lives of millions, is not in prison. Owners of under-maintained mines, where workers suffer and die, are not imprisoned. Congressmen who break every law of ethics, aren't in prison. Some of these powerful men might spend a week, month or year at a federal detention center where they are protected by guards; but none of them are sent to hell-holes like Ossining, Cedar Junction, Starke, Rahway, San Quentin, or any of the thousands of state prisons funded by taxpayers. Places where brutal rape, assault and battery, extortion, and enslavement are ignored.

No, rich white guys who destroy America are never sent anywhere they might get hurt. In fact, most of them are free to continue running their business and develop their career while imprisoned.

A single mother of two who caries an ounce of cocaine from Jersey to Harlem, in hopes of earning an extra seventy-five bucks to maintain her household is serving life in one of these joints! A guy who robs an entire community of its pension money is slapped on the wrist.

America's sense of justice is so out-of-whack that we are totally unqualified to work for justice offshore. We actually are not only unqualified, we are unable to do it. Our justice policies and our foreign policies are so draconian and immoral that even when we want to help we are doomed to failure. Why? The people to whom we have abdicated our government since 1980 are interested only in using government policy for personal profiteering. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II have now so deeply embedded a liberalized economy that we can't even have a conversation in the media about the ideas behind a liberalized economy and its impact on our moral fabric, lest we be called names.

We cannot get involved in a war without a profit motive, which makes it impossible for us to help those who most need our military intervention. Our only successful military actions of the last 25 years have been in conjunction with other nations under the auspices of the United Nations. Any other actions we have taken have been bared naked as immoral aggression against people unable to defend themselves against us: Panama, Grenada, Iraq. All unmitigated foolishness rooted in a need to control the flow of resources that are not rightfully ours.

When will the American people begin to speak-up about the disaster our nation has become?

Let's hope the election of a Democratic congress is the beginning of Americans really wanting change.

Let's see if Americans will vote third-party in two years when they realize that the Dems are no more capable of helping than the GOP.

Perhaps they will.