Afghanistan Aff
Download 0.73 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- 1AC Terrorism Advantage
1AC Terrorism AdvantageDestroying opium causes farmers to turn to the Taliban to avoid death Walt 10 (Vivienne, April 1, “Afghanistan’s New Bumper Drug Crop: Cannabis”, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1976867,00.html, date accessed: 6/22/2010) AJK Worse, many believe the policies have helped stoke the Taliban's war against the coalition by uniting residents against the Afghan soldiers who destroyed their opium crops. "Eradicating marijuana and opium fields can breed resentment by people and be destabilizing," says John Dempsey, a rule-of-law adviser to U.S. and Afghan officials for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He cites the town of Marjah, in Helmand province, where U.S. forces rolled tanks over poppy fields in a major offensive in February, two years after Afghan forces destroyed the local farmers' opium crops. After those antidrug offensives, Dempsey says, "local residents felt they preferred the Taliban, because they let them grow opium." About 70% of the farmers surveyed by local U.N. workers in 20 largely Taliban-controlled provinces said they paid about 10% of their earnings to the local forces that controlled their areas. Dempsey believes farmers could be better persuaded to give up growing opium and cannabis if Western and Afghan officials introduced big incentives and subsidies for growing food crops and helped farmers sell them. One crucial problem, he says, is that the roads in southern Afghanistan are too dangerous for farmers to drive their crops to local markets. Groups of armed drug traffickers, meanwhile, travel through the countryside, buying opium and cannabis at the farm gates for cash. For many farmers in the area, making a living and staying alive — sadly — go hand in hand. Crop eradication makes Afghan farmers dependant on the Taliban Drug War Chronicle 9 (7/3/2009, http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/592/afghanistan_US_stops_opium_poppy_eradication, date accessed: 6/22/2010)AJK "The new counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan which scales down eradication and emphasizes rural development and interdiction is exactly right," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a drugs, development, and security expert with the Brookings Institution. "Under the prevailing conditions in Afghanistan, eradication has been not only ineffective; it has been counterproductive because it strengthens the bond between the rural population dependent on the illicit economy and the Taliban. Backing away from counterproductive eradication is not only a right analysis, it is also a courageous break on the part of the Obama administration with decades of failed counternarcotics strategy worldwide that centers on premature and unsustainable eradication," she added. "This is clearly a positive, pragmatic step," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "It seems that the Obama administration is so deeply invested in succeeding in Afghanistan that they're actually willing to pursue a pragmatic drug policy. This is an intelligent move," he added. "It is an implicit recognition that you are not going to eradicate opium production in this world so long as there is a market for it. Given that Afghanistan is the dominant opium producer right now, the pragmatic strategy is to figure out how to manage that production rather than to pursue a politically destructive and ineffective crop eradication strategy. 1AC Terrorism AdvantageThe war on drugs makes it impossible to win the overall war Carpenter 4 (Ted Galen, “How the Drug War in Afghanistan Undermines America’s War on Terror”, Nov 10, Foreign Policy Briefing, http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb84.pdf , date accessed: 6/21/2010) AJK The war on drugs is interfering with the U.S. effort to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. U.S. officials increasingly want to eradicate drugs as well as nurture Afghanistan’s embryonic democracy, symbolized by the pro-Western regime of President Hamid Karzai. They need to face the reality that it is not possible to accomplish both objectives. An especially troubling indicator came in August 2004 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that drug eradication in Afghanistan was a high priority of the Bush administration and indicated that the United States and its coalition partners were in the process of formulating a “master plan” for dealing with the problem.1 “The danger a large drug trade poses in this country is too serious to ignore,” Rumsfeld said. “The inevitable result is to corrupt the government and way of life, and that would be most unfortunate.”2 The DEA angers Afghanis and hurts the War on Terror. Balko 9 (Radley, a policy analyst for the Cato Institute, January 23, 2009, http://reason.org/news/show/the-drug-wars-collateral-damag)SRH America’s quest to rid the world of illicit drugs knows no boundaries—political or moral. Just months before September 11, we gave $43 million to Afghanistan—a way of compensating Afghan farmers hurt by the Taliban’s compliance with a U.S. request to crack down on that country’s opium farms (as it turns out, the Taliban had merely eradicated the farms in competition with the Taliban’s own producers). We don’t seem to have learned. The western world’s prohibition on opium makes poppies a lucrative crop for impoverished Afghan farmers, and is a valuable recruiting tool for insurgents and remnant Taliban forces. At the same time, we have DEA agents and U.S. and United Nations troops roving the country on search-and-destroy missions, setting Afghani livelihoods aflame before their very eyes—not exactly the way to build alliances. Former BBC correspondent Misha Glenny, author of a book on the global drug trade, explained last year in the Washington Post: In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror." But it isn’t just Afghanistan. The U.S. has a long history of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and unintended consequences in the name of eradicating illicit drugs overseas. For example, between 2001 and 2003, the U.S. gave more than $12 million to Thailand for drug interdiction efforts. Over ten months in 2003, the Thai government sent out anti-drug “death squads” to carry out the summary, extra-judicial executions of as many as 4,000 suspected drug offenders. Many were later found to have had nothing to do with the drug trade at all. Though the U.S. State Department denounced the killings, the United States continued to give the same Thai regime millions in aid for counter-narcotics operations. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.73 Mb. Share with your friends:
|