Afghanistan's Drug Problem

[Dayuhan]

The simple question must be asked why the US government (under both Bush and Obama) have chosen to cosy up to an obviously corrupt and democratically illegitimate regime ... together with scum of the earth druglords and warlords who infest the country.

What options have they got? The US doesn't have the capacity to create a non-corrupt democratically legitimate regime in Afghanistan. Short of letting the Taliban have the place or the non-option of taking over and running it as a colony, what else would you have them do?

Personally, I don't think the US should ever have gotten involved in prolonged occupation, installing governments, or attempts at "nation-building", but it's a little late for that.

The rate of car accident deaths in the US have nothing to do with the cycle from poppy cultivation in Afghanistan to heroin death in the US and the opportunities for at source eradication.

The key word here is "cycle". The question is what point of that cycle is the most efficient and economical target for intervention. Given the cost of military intervention in Afghanistan, I'd suggest that we'd be better off attacking the cycle where it's actually under our control, and we can do it with our own government, rather than having to either work though a completely dysfunctional government elsewhere.

US drug policy has for years been based on the utterly boneheaded notion that supply creates demand, that the people who buy drugs are innocent victims who need to be helped and the people who sell them are the evil ones who must be punished. That policy has left demand unchecked and has constrained supply just enough to make the business incredibly profitable. Of course as long as the demand and the profit are there, somebody somewhere will produce the stuff. The basic force driving the business is not supply, but demand. Trying to blame Mexican cartels (we're already being told we have to "do COIN" in Mexico) or Afghan growers for a problem that starts within our own borders is utterly counterproductive: until the US gets serious about addressing demand, any "solution" will be stopgap at best.