GWOT vs. GWOD

The U.S. is now involved in so many "wars" that conflicting interests are inevitable. Case in point: Afghanistan, the world's biggest provider of poppy derivatives (especially heroin). Comes now the news that the Obama administration is (wisely) ramping down the pesticide-spraying program aimed at Afghan poppy production in order to cease driving rural peasants toward the Taliban. I don't imagine the DEA is too happy about this, but Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, sees the wisdom in this decision:

"Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars we've spent on crop eradication has not done any damage to the Taliban. On the contrary, it's helped them recruit," Holbrooke said.
"In my experience," the veteran US diplomat and negotiator said, "this is the least effective program ever."

He's right. This has been a stupidly counterproductive program that has done more to help the Taliban than to eradicate the world's heroin supply, which is a quixotic quest, to put it mildly. The Bush administration instituted the spraying program to attack heroin production, but it resulted in a record HIGH in heroin output emanating from Afghanistan in 2006.

Was that year unusual? Hardly. As Prof. Peter Dale Scott wrote at GlobalResearch.org:

Just as the indirect American intervention of 1979 was followed by an unprecedented increase in Afghan opium production, so the pattern has repeated itself since the American invasion of 2001. Opium poppy cultivation in hectares more than doubled, from a previous high of 91,000 in 1999 (reduced by the Taliban to 8,000 in 2001) to 165,000 in 2006 and 193,000 in 2007. (Though 2008 saw a reduced planting of 157,000 hectares, this was chiefly explained by previous over-production, in excess of what the world market could absorb.

No one should have been surprised by these increases: they merely repeated the dramatic increases in every other drug-producing area where America has become militarily or politically involved. This was demonstrated over and over in the 1950s, in Burma (thanks to CIA intervention, from 40 tons in 1939 to 600 tons in 1970),[35] in Thailand (from 7 tons in 1939 to 200 tons in 1968) and Laos (less than 15 tons in 1939 to 50 tons in 1973).[36]

The most dramatic case is that of Colombia, where the intervention of U.S. troops since the late 1980s has been misleadingly justified as a part of a "war on drugs." At a conference in 1990 I predicted that this intervention would be followed by an increase in drug production, not a reduction.[37] But even I was surprised by the size of the increase that ensued. Coca production in Colombia tripled between 1991 and 1999 (from 3.8 to 12.3 thousand hectares), while the cultivation of opium poppy increased by a multiple of 5.6 (from .13 to .75 thousand hectares).[38]

I am not suggesting that there is any single explanation for this pattern of drug increase. But it is essential that we recognize American intervention as part of the problem, rather than simply look to it than as a solution.

The lesson here is that our interventions in everyone else's business -- even their illegal business -- tends to make the problems worse, not better. What was it that Ronald Reagan said about "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"? (Too bad Reagan didn't follow his own advice, either.)

Heroin is a godawful drug, and addiction is a serious problem requiring treatment. Prohibition has been a disaster, and in Afghanistan, prohibition efforts are simply putting our troops in greater danger.