Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
is the hot new book on how our tax money is being wasted in Afghanistan. A lot of careful reporting establishes that the opium/heroin trade finances angry Muslims, to the tune of 30 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. This is not a surprising result when you consider the likelihood of Afghans, more than 70 percent of whom are illiterate, competing successfully in the world economy. What else could they be doing to generate cash?
[The author looks back to the 1970s, when the Afghans had some success with agricultural exports other than heroin, and suggests a goal of returning to the 1970s; she ignores the facts that in the 1970s there was no competition from China and India (both had economies hobbled by government restrictions), transportation from the Far East was much more expensive, and the Internet was not available in China, India, and a variety of Asian countries with highly educated citizens.]
The author’s conclusion is that we need dramatic changes in our strategy. It is not sufficient to destroy poppy crops with aerial spraying. We need to imprison the chemists who turn poppy into heroin. We need to build up the Afghan economy so that its illiterate farmers will find it more profitable to grow something other than poppy. We need to reform the corrupt government, starting with the president’s brother, who is apparently a big heroin dealer himself.
This made me ask whether it is reasonable to assume limits to U.S. power. Suppose that we succeed in imprisoning all chemists and shutting down all drug labs. Given a supply of poppy and a market for heroin, aren’t there some sufficiently enterprising Afghans who could learn to make heroin? Can we build up the Afghan economy so that people can find better jobs than being a drug dealer? We haven’t succeeded in building up the U.S. economy to that extent; there are plenty of U.S. residents who have chosen drug dealing over other careers. Could we make the Afghan police so effective that they can find and successfully prosecute 100 percent of drug dealers? We haven’t done that with our own police. Can we fix their corrupt government? Our own government just handed out $2 trillion to various cronies.
When planning an overseas adventure, would it make sense to break the project down into small tasks and ask “Can Americans do this?” Let’s consider aerial spraying. That is equivalent to asking the questions “Can an American fly an airplane?”; “Can an American sit in an airplane and identify a poppy field?”; “Can an American purchase some Roundup from Monsanto?’; “Can an American pilot release the Roundup on top of the poppy field?”
The answers to all of these questions is plainly “yes” and in many cases these are things that Americans have 100 years of experience doing. The author of Seeds of Terror dismisses aerial spraying as ineffective, but at least we can be confident that it is doable. An effective strategy that requires us to do things that we can’t do is more like a dream than a workable plan.
Had we broken down our Iraq and Afghanistan projects into tasks of this size, we probably would have found a lot of “no” answers and that would have been a warning that we needed to plan something different and simpler.
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