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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (30675)	10/31/2006 7:54:28 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

I think Iraq is a lost cause...but regardless, pulling out would not have a long term effect. The US credibility issue (or lack there of) has been in the making for decades and it will take decades of consistent foreign policy to make up for it. The big problem is of course that there is no continuity in our foreign policy and it is primarily hostage to various special interest groups.

To: TimF who wrote (30675)	11/1/2006 8:07:55 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

How do you feel about our credibility vis-à-vis Afghanistan? When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the US occupation that followed the defeat of the Taliban, poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since - this year by 60%. Like Musharraf in Pakistan, Karzai walks a tightrope between domestic politics and US demands for dramatic actions - such as ending the drug trade - clearly well beyond his powers. The trade penetrates even the elected parliament, which is full of the usual suspects. Among the 249 members of the wolesi jirga (lower house) are at least 17 known drug traffickers in addition to 40 commanders of armed militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegations of war crimes and human-rights violations, any or all of whom may be affiliated with the poppy business. For years the Kabul rumor mill has traced the drug trade to the family of the president himself. Through many administrations, the US government is itself implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) fostered anti-Soviet Islamist extremists, and to finance their covert operations it fostered the drug trade as well. Before the US-and-Pakistani-sponsored mujahideen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced only a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army of occupation, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. As Alfred W McCoy reports in The Politics of Heroin, Afghan mujahideen - the guys president Ronald Reagan famously likened to "our founding fathers" - ordered Afghan farmers to grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani army transported it to Karachi for shipment overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations. After the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration made use of the United States' old Islamist allies, paying them millions of dollars to hunt bin Laden, a task to which they do not appear to have been entirely devoted. Asked in 2004 why the US wasn't going after drug kingpins in Afghanistan, an unnamed US official told a New York Times reporter that the drug lords were "the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001", the guys the US is still relying on to get bin Laden. ... atimes.com