On Tuesday of this week the White House announced that President Obama is ordering an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan immediately. These troops are not meant to signal the beginning of an overall reinforcement strategy, but are rather a stop gap measure. (A review of the overall strategy is underway already and will likely be completed in the next few months; it is doubtful that the President is going to be enthusiastic about any of his options.) On Wednesday, Juan Cole put the troop increase in perspective:
McClatchy reports that the new troops will mainly be sent to Helmand Province, a major poppy-producing areas, and will have poppy eradication as a major mission. If this report is true, it is very troubling. There is reason to think that forcible poppy eradication has produced the growing insurgency. Poppies are used to make heroin, and exports of the drug account for over a third of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. But many Afghan farmers are destitute after 30 years of war, and this crop is their one hope of escaping poverty. They grow irate when someone comes in with helicopters and torches to destroy the crop.
(Writing at Slate, Fred Kaplan has an excellent summary of where things stand.)
Irate may be an understatement, but the important thing to keep in mind is that all the US government’s power cannot even remotely successfully prosecute a drug war here in America, and now we’re thinking about trying it in Afghanistan.
Of course, Afghanistan isn’t the only place where professional military forces are being used to wage the catastrophic and increasingly militarized “war on drugs”. Mexico has recently pushed its military directly into the fray by imposing martial law on some areas of the US-Mexico border. Amanda Marcotte puts that into perspective:
Alas, it’s not that easy to separate the villains and the heroes in this story, because while martial law, official or not, is one of those human rights violations that we strive as an evolved species to avoid, the Mexican government has a mother of all problems on their hands, and it’s hard to fault them for trying to fix it. In this case, the ongoing war between drug cartels in Mexico has grown especially hot in our troubled days, and the year 2008 saw at least 6,000 murders related directly to the drug trade.
You heard me right—6,000 murders.
(The New York Times had a story about this back in December.)
Obviously these two situations have a lot of differences, for starters one is a domestic deployment of military force and the other is foreign. But the Pentagon now sees the Mexican government as potentially becoming unstable on account of drugs:
A report released this month by the U.S. Joint Forces Command is warning of the potential for “rapid and sudden collapse” of the Mexican government due to the corrupting influence of criminal gangs and drug cartels. The Joint Operating Environment 2008 document (pdf) also lists Pakistan as the other of two large and important states that “bear consideration,”
The Mexicans took some justified offense to this, but however much it might be gringo paranoia talking, the US military is now openly considering the possibility that the trade in illegal drugs could destabilize Mexico’s entire government. They’re even drawing explicit parallels between Mexico and Afghanistan’s turbulent neighbor. And this isn’t just a rough patch that can be gotten through with some grit and toughness, the world appetite for illegal narcotics is not about to start shrinking.
Obviously these two situations are by no means equivalent, and illegal narcotics are only a part of each story, but they do share one undisputable commonality: militaries (beholden to democratically elected governments) are being used to enforce civilian agricultural and criminal policies. Moreover, many of the civilians that actually live in these places are extremely upset by this.
Bad ideas are bad ideas, in any context.
