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StumbleSun Editorial:
Request is out of line
Russia’s top drug official wants U.S. to eradicate Afghan poppy fields from the air
Monday, Sept. 28, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.
The United States should adopt an all-out eradication policy in regard to the poppy fields in Afghanistan, says Viktor Ivanov, the top drug enforcement official in Russia.
Ivanov was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “I would call upon the United States to use defoliation from the air.”
One can understand Ivanov’s position. Russian authorities, the Times reported, estimate that 30,000 of their citizens die every year from drug use.
Ivanov said it is heroin, made from poppies grown in Afghanistan, that is used by 90 percent of his country’s drug addicts.
However understandable Russia’s concern is, though, it would be wrong to grant its request. The Afghan people remain bitter toward Russia because of the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Many who now purport to be our friends would overtly turn against us if they thought we were colluding with the Russians.
Also, eradicating poppy fields from the air would be an expansion of the war and move it further from its original mission. Only the U.S. president, in consultation with Congress and coalition allies, should be directing Afghanistan policy.
Even under the Bush administration, which ordered aggressive manual eradication of poppy fields, spraying herbicides over large areas of Afghanistan was out of the question.
The Obama administration, persuaded by reports that eradication was motivating Afghanistan farmers to become our enemies, has been following a policy of seizing drug shipments and introducing alternative crops.
Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote a column last year for The Washington Post in which he stated that eradication “may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaida.”
Certainly that assessment is what should be guiding our policy on poppy fields.
If White House policy on eradication is to ever change, it should be at the recommendation of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan — not an official from Russia.
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Why do you think the US is there? Won't happen, we need those cheap addictive drugs.
Simple solution to the poppy problem?
Have the US and allies create a 10 yr.'set aside' program like the conservation program in the USA where we paid farmers to fallow their crop acres for a yearly cash payment.
Allow the Afganistan farners to plant and harvest a cover crop like wheat, barley or forage on their land as a substitute for poppies.
Isn't this easier than making enemies and getting American soldiers killied and maimed?
Why does the USA need Russia to make this rather obvious suggestion? The first clause of this editorial...
"The United States should adopt an all-out eradication policy in regard to the poppy fields in Afghanistan,"
...is all that should be said.
If we are in Afghanistan to keep from fighting the war on terror here at home why doesn't the same apply to the war on drugs?
If we can eradicate the problem at the source why do we wait to shoot it out with the dealers here at home while our kids are being addicted?
MONEY is the only answer.
Neiman1,
it's a tad more complicated than "MONEY is the only answer." Many, many factors at play here.