"We're not having the right debate and we're certainly not covering it enough."
Dan Rather reporting from Afghanistan

Like thousands of others, I have become a constant viewer of the Rachel Maddow show. Ms. Maddow's depth of policy understanding, wry sense of humor, and ability to get any guest she wants make her one hour commentary on the day's news required viewing. We have lucked into a pundit that is beginning to wield a tremendous amount of influence with both our policy makers and her viewers. Which is why I feel that the drug policy community must call Ms. Maddow out on her coverage of Afghanistan. Please take a moment to watch this interview with Dan Rather:


It's hard to argue with the conclusion that in regards to Afghanistan, we have three choices:

1. End the war completely and bring our soldiers home
2. Deploy a troop intensive counterinsurgency, and attempt to create a legitimate government and a legitimate source of authority
3. Counter-terrorism, a much smaller, more targeted mission where we're not trying to build up a state, only eliminate the enemy.

After eight years in Iraq at about 10 billion tax payer dollars per day, I cannot find one shred of pragmatic sense in pursuing number 2. As Ms. Maddow points out at the beginning of the piece, long term occupation of Afghanistan has been the fall of nations since Alexander the Great. With our economy in free fall and an Argentina-style economic collapse an emerging reality, it has got to be number 1 or number 3.

What Ms. Maddow doesn't mention here or in other segments about Afghanistan is that we cannot simultaneously fight a war on terror and a war on drugs. Consider the following commentary from Lee Rosenberg, a software developer who became motivated by the war in Iraq to start speaking out about politics and the direction the country is going in:

To get some perspective on how entrenched the heroin trafficking industry is in Afghanistan, it amounts to over half of the country's entire GDP. Compare that to Mexico, where drug trafficking makes up less than 10% of the country's GDP - yet is still far too powerful for the Mexican government to dismantle. The only real counterargument to the accusation that Afghanistan is a narco-state is that Afghanistan really isn't a state at all, just a loose federation of warlords, many of whom profit from drug production. It's an open secret among intelligence officials that even Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, profits from the trade.

The Taliban are enriching themselves by either providing protection for the drug trade or just participating in the trade themselves. In some cases, we've seen the Taliban being paid for their services directly in high-powered weapons, which have fueled the last several "spring offensives" against coalition troops. The reason that this time of year is when the Taliban strikes has little to do with weather, but because the early spring is when the opium is harvested, processed into heroin, and sent to the west, leaving the Taliban flush with cash, weapons, and plenty of free time that had recently been spent protecting fields.

Our eradication efforts do little more than anger local farmers and encourage corruption. Local officials who are tasked with carrying out the eradications (the law still requires that Afghan forces carry them out) are easily bribed or threatened by the drug traffickers and the Taliban. A recent report on a local group of Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan by the Canadian Globe and Mail found that half joined the effort to fight the international coalition because their family's livelihoods had been destroyed through opium eradication efforts. For another 25%, it was anger over heavy-handed military tactics, such as aerial bombings, being used by the coalition.

How about the following as a counter-terrorism tactic that doesn't involve killing:

One potential avenue for improving our approach in Afghanistan involves allowing for the legal production of opiates by Afghan farmers. It's been estimated that dozens of countries around the world are lacking in supplies of opiate-based medicines. Without a simultaneous reduction in demand for illegal heroin, this approach certainly won't end the illegal drug trade, but it could help limit some of the massive profits being made by the Taliban in certain areas of the country. The European Union even passed a resolution encouraging the international coalition to look at this option, but the approach was strongly rejected by the U.S. State Department under Condoleezza Rice.

As of the end of 2008, it was believed that the Taliban controlled up to 70% of the country once again. They've been able to do this primarily through the opium trade. Our mistaken belief that this illegal industry is a form of defiance akin with the anti-Western sentiments of al-Qaeda has been instrumental in allowing that to happen. Afghans have never participated in the opium trade in order to bring down the west. They participated in the trade in order to make a living in one the world's most destitute places. But our inability to understand the difference has created a situation where our paranoid beliefs have become self-fulfilling prophecies. The Taliban, which has itself evolved from an ultra-religious entity to a more generally nationalist one, now does see the drug trade as a way to poison the western world.

It's hard to watch someone as smart and influential as Ms. Maddow take a sustained interest in an important issue and leave such a big part of the picture out. If she were to draw the connection between the Taliban and opium production as well as the war on drugs' irreconcilable conflict with the war on terror, Hillary Clinton's state department not only would listen, Richard Holbrooke may come on the show for a real debate about our strategy and our options.

Perhaps you could take a minute to send Ms. Maddow an email at Rachel@msnbc.com and ask her to take a look at the elephant in the desert the next time she does a segment on our soon to be escalated war in Afghanistan.

Labels: Afghanistan, heroin, opium, poppies, rachel maddow, taliban, war on drugs, war on terror