Kontar: Blood flowers and greenbacks

Blood flowers and greenbacks
Last week, U.S. President Bush promulgated another Executive Order to contain terrorist funding for the Iraq insurgency, the “aid and support” of those who want to bring failure to the new government and reconstruction process. I have a more comprehensive, Iraq-focused post on this issue over at my other blog. Yet this Executive Order is equally relevant for FPA Central Asia–because of its major omission, rather than its commissions.

In no place is Afghanistan mentioned in this order. No attempt is made to interrupt financial aid and dollar comfort to the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or any other terrorist or insurgent groups that attack Afghanistan’s government officials or Afghanistan’s infrastructure.

The Afghanistan war is fought in an area which has little in the way of an economy to sustain war: no oil, no timber, no gold, no diamonds or other precious substances. The sole economic self-help in this war occurs through an agricultural crop–the opium poppy. Right now, that crop has reached record-busting levels. Surrounding nations: Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan are all feeling the security breach occasioned by the crime associated with this economy, and the war; they are also daily assaulted by the public health and safety problems occasioned by the use of poppy byproducts. It has become the means for changes of balance of power in the five-state Central Asian area, and its tentacles are felt in Russia, the Caucasus, Europe, the Americas–everywhere.

We need, in some ways, to look at the poppy as if it was a hydrocarbon or a blood diamond–because it is ubiquitous on the ground and it is not going away. Instead of trying to bulldoze every field in Afghanistan, the nexus points of money transfer for arms and aid need to be found and stopped in order to cut off war funding for the insurgency. This more surgical method has the power to take poppy eradication from the small, starving farmer to the international crime and terror advocates who amass money in the name of violence; it cuts off those officials and officers from a corrupt, destabilizing source of income; and it also tamps down on terrorist or criminal efforts in areas beyond Central Asia or the Middle East.

That said, why is Afghanistan being ignored in the new measures for money laundering and bank account interdiction? I plain, flat, have no idea. But it certainly seems like an unfortunate, nay, glaring oversight, and one that is not good for Afghanistan, or for any other part of Central Asia.

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Travis Armstrong and the Santa Barbara News-Press: here is an interesting article about Afghanistan. It is a complicated matter, this is a little start. We're hearing the Afghans do not like the warlords that we support any better than the Taleban warlords. When NATO eradicates crops it is often selective. What happens is the poor farmers get hurt. We are not eradicating opium, we let our favorite warlords profit, all the abuse and trafficing continues. There are better ideas for destroying the Taleban economy. America comsumes it's share of opium, who are we funding?

Don't you think more information and discussion is a good thing? Don't you want to learn more about the lack of intelligence, poor equipment, bad training that puts our troops in unnecessary danger in Afghanistan? Soon we may be spending more money to bomb No.Waziristan and our troops in Afghanistan will be even more rag tag. No one has thought Osama Bin Laden is in Afghanistan for awhile. Now POSSIBLY Osama Bin Laden is in No. Waziristan after we warn them... whatever, we'll bomb and more humanitarian aid will be needed. The animal kingdom is there as well.

Iraq is expensive, Afghanistan is on a budget plan, what will No.Waziristan cost? Saving Musharraf in Pakistan? Iran? How much?