Today's lunacy comes from US officials whose diligence and patience in seeking fresh ways to wreck Afghanistan could be commendable were it not to eye-wateringly stupid:
It is a measure of this country’s virulent opium trade, which has helped revive the Taliban while corroding the credibility of the Afghan government, that American officials hope that Afghanistan’s drug problem will someday be only as bad as that of Colombia.
While the Latin American nation remains the world’s cocaine capital and is still plagued by drug-related violence, American officials argue that decades of American counternarcotics efforts there have at least helped stabilize the country.
“I wanted the Colombians to come here to give the Afghans something to aspire to,” Mr. Balbo [the US Drug Enforcement Agency's Kabul chief] said. “To instill the fact that they have been doing this for years, and it has worked.”
Just to be clear: if Afghanistan endures a half century of civil war - a good deal of it fuelled by American and European drug policies - this will be considered a success. Who are these guys? Characters in an Evelyn Waugh satire?
How's Colombia doing anyway? Well, according to the International Crisis Group:
Since early 2006, the Organization of American States (OAS) Peace Support Mission in Colombia (MAPP/OEA), human rights groups and civil society organisations have insistently warned about the rearming of demobilised paramilitary units, the continued existence of groups that did not disband because they did not participate in the government-AUC negotiations and the merging of former paramilitary elements with powerful criminal organisations, often deeply involved with drug trafficking. Worse, there is evidence that some of the new groups and criminal organisations have established business relations over drugs with elements of the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN). At the same time, the government’s plan for reintegrating demobilised paramilitaries has revealed itself to be deeply flawed.
These alerts have to be taken seriously since conditions now exist for the continuity or re-emergence either of old-style paramilitary groups or a federation of new groups and criminal organisations based on the drug trade. The military struggles with the FARC and the smaller ELN are ongoing, and drug trafficking continues unabated. Massive illegal funds from drug trafficking help fuel the decades-long conflict, undermine reintegration of former combatants into society and foment the formation and strengthening of new armed groups, as occurred with the AUC and the FARC more than a decade ago.
You'd say it was unbelievable that you could think Colombia a model success ripe for export except, of course, nothing should surprise one when it comes to our happy drug-warriors who remain hooked on some logic-bending substance vastly more ruinous than anything produced in Colombia or Afghanistan.
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