AC Terrorism Advantage- Impacts

1AC Terrorism Advantage- Impacts

The Associated Press reports that 16 Afghan soldiers have just graduated from a new program at Fort Bliss that trained them to fly helicopters in drug eradication campaigns. They will now return to their homeland, the world’s top opium producer. Washington’s increasing pressure on the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to wage a vigorous war on drugs is the latest installment in a prohibitionist strategy that has failed for decades. The international drug war is a terrible policy wherever it is tried, but it is an especially unwise venture in Afghanistan. As a recent Cato Institute policy study notes, the drug trade accounts for more than a third of that country’s economic output. Regional warlords who originally backed the Taliban and Al Qaeda but switched their allegiance to the Karzai government derive much of their revenue from the opium trade. Even more important, hundreds of thousands of Afghan farmers base their livelihood on drug crops. They will not look kindly on the Karzai government if it tries to drive their families into destitution. U.S. policymakers need to keep their priorities straight. Our overriding objective in Afghanistan should be to eliminate the remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. The drug war undermines that objective and may drive otherwise friendly Afghans into the arms of our enemies. There is a troubling correlation between the upsurge of violence in Afghanistan in recent months and the intensification of drug-eradication efforts during that same period. Indeed, the upsurge has been greatest in the main drug-producing provinces. Even those Americans who remain wedded to a prohibitionist policy as a general principle ought to realize that an exception needs to be made in Afghanistan. Otherwise, the Taliban-Al Qaeda insurgency will grow, and we will replicate the Iraq debacle in that country, too.

Press coverage of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was largely negative. For example, Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, commented that the loss of unity within the United States and in the world is as much a cause for mourning as the attack itself.9 The Council on Foreign Relations update on ‘The Terror War and Remembrance’ reports on both optimistic and pessimistic assessments and concludes that although the question of ‘Is America winning or losing this fight?’ is on the minds of everyone, there is no simple answer.10 My critical assessment of official strategy is not meant to imply that there have been no successes, including extensive international cooperation in law enforcement and intelligence areas, arrests of many if not all important al-Qaeda leaders, disruption of numerous plots and efforts by the United Nations and other international bodies to promote norms that delegitimise terrorism. However, official American statements do not recognise that many of the means by which the ‘GWOT’ has been implemented have jeopardised the legitimacy of American leadership and made American hegemony seem less than benign. American power has become suspect.

1AC Terrorism Advantage- Impacts

And, hegemonic decline leads to transition wars – the impact is extinction
Nye 90 (Joseph- Professor of Interntl Rel& former Dean of the Kennedy School @ Harvard, IR scholar, Bound To Lead, p.17) ET

Perceptions of change in the relative power of nations are of critical importance to understanding the relationship between decline and war. One of the oldest generalizations about international politics attributes the onset of major wars to shifts in power among the leading nations. Thus Thucydides accounted for the onset of the Peloponnesian War which destroyed the power of ancient Athens. The history of the interstate system since 1500 is punctuated by severe wars in which one country struggled to surpass another as the leading state. If as Robert Gilpin argues, international politics has not changed fundamentally over the millennia, “the implications for the future are bleak. And if fears about shifting power precipitate a major war in a world with 50,000 nuclear weapons, history as we know it may end.
And, realism and power politics are inevitable – this means the United States will inevitably act to ensure its own security and so will foreign powers – the only question is whether we can back it up
Mearsheimer 5 (prof of poli sci @ u of Chicago The Australian, 18-Nov 5) ET

The question at hand is simple and profound: can China rise peacefully? My answer is no. If China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades, the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war. Most of China’s neighbors, to include India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, and Vietnam, will join with the United States to contain China’s power. To predict the future in Asia, one needs a theory of international politics that explains how rising great powers are likely to act and how the other states in the system will react to them. That theory must be logically sound and it must account for the past behavior of rising great powers. My theory of international politics says that the mightiest states attempt to establish hegemony in their region of the world, while making sure that no rival great power dominates another region. After laying out the theory, I will show its explanatory power by applying it to U.S. foreign policy since the country’s founding. I will then discuss the implications of the theory and America’s past behavior for future relations between China and the United States THE THEORY Survival is a state’s most important goal, because a state cannot pursue any other goals if it does not survive. The basic structure of the international system forces states concerned about their security to compete with each other for power. The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the system. The international system has three defining characteristics. First, the main actors are states that operate in anarchy, which simply means that there is no higher authority above them. Second, all great powers have some offensive military capability, which means that they have the wherewithal to hurt each other. Third, no state can know the intentions of other states with certainty, especially their future intentions. It is simply impossible, for example, to know what Germany or Japan’s intentions will be towards their neighbors in 2025. In a world where other states might have malign intentions as well as significant offensive capabilities, states tend to fear each other. That fear is compounded by the fact that in an anarchic system there is no night-watchman for states to call if trouble comes knocking at their door. Therefore, states recognize that the best way to survive in such a system is to be as powerful as possible relative to potential rivals. The mightier a state is, the less likely it is that another state will attack it. No Americans, for example, worry that Canada or Mexico will attack the United States, because neither of those countries is powerful enough to contemplate a fight with Uncle Sam. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest great power, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon – that is, the only great power in the system.

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