Afghanistan Aff
Stability Advantage – I/L – WoD Leads to Taliban
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Stability Advantage – I/L – WoD Leads to TalibanDestroying 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) AK 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)AK "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." Stability Advantage – I/L – WoD Leads to TalibanThe drug war increases Taliban recruitment Bandow 4 (Doug, “Solving Afghanistan’s Opium Problem, October 20th, San Diego Union-Tribune, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2858 , date accessed: 6/22/2010) AK Afghanistan's presidential elections came off with little violence but some damaging controversy. President Hamid Karzai's 15 opponents charged vote fraud. Whether the election is perceived as legitimate is only the second most important issue facing the war-torn nation. Most critical is whether the Bush administration risks undermining the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in an attempt to suppress drug production. Unfortunately, Afghanistan has become a global Opiates 'R' Us. Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. More by Doug Bandow In a nation where the average wage is a $2 a day, heroin and opium trafficking produced revenues last year estimated at $2.3 billion annually - as much as 60 percent of Afghanistan's official annual GDP. Opium has become the perfect export from a land enveloped by chaos and war. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has attempted to craft a positive spin: "The establishment of democracy in Afghanistan and the Government's measures against cultivation, trade and abuse of opium have been crucial steps toward solving the drug problem." The fundamentalist Taliban took power in 1996 and banned use of all intoxicants, including opiates. However, Kabul had no objection to people selling drugs to infidels. Following the Taliban's ouster, the new government outlawed opium production. But chaos meant that the poppy fields were replanted and smuggling revived. Regime change, though necessary for security purposes, did not provide Afghan households with a new income. Moreover, Hamid Karzai rules little more than Kabul. Even a successful election won't help much. Poppy production has spread to 28 of 32 provinces, and the Afghan government figures that about 30 percent of families are involved in the trade. Until now, controlling opium trafficking has not been the top U.S. priority in Afghanistan. Although the Defense Department is careful to appear cooperative, U.S. forces have largely ignored drug trafficking unrelated to enemy action. The Taliban is involved in drug trafficking, but so are many of Karzai's (and America's) local warlord allies. The poppy traders "are the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001," one U.S. official told The New York Times. Unfortunately, even the return of stability and prosperity won't eliminate the drug trade. Observed the UNODC, "Given the current opium prices within Afghanistan, it is also clear that no other crop can compete with opium poppy as a source of income." Which leaves interdiction. Interdiction in regions run by warlords and where the Taliban and al-Qaeda are active. To his credit, House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., says "I do not want our military forces, already tasked with vital counterterrorism and stability operations, to become Afghanistan's anti-narcotics police." That, he says, should be the job of "Afghan police, army and judicial authorities we are helping to build." Yet there is no functioning Afghan state. How is a government that is unable to secure its capital city going to squelch poppy production in distant provinces? U.S. forces, just 18,000 in the entire country, already are badly stretched. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Washington and its allies are developing a "master plan" to combat opium production. Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, promises: "We intend to be very aggressive, very proactive." He adds, "If the penalties are high enough, they will not grow heroin poppies. But if Washington penalizes its erstwhile allies, it risks driving them back to the Taliban. Indeed, drug producers are suspected to have staged the bomb attack on the private security firm DynCorp, which has been training anti-narcotics police. The Karzai government claimed that the same forces attempted to assassinate vice presidential candidate Ahmed Zia Masood. Eradication increases the number of farmers who defect to the Taliban Durham 9 (Major Jan R., 4/5/2009, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA502865, date accessed: 6/22/2010) AK Eradication Doesn’t Work: Eradication is counterproductive and actually strengthens the opium trade while hampering U.S. and Afghan efforts to stamp it out. This approach has proven ineffective not only in Afghanistan, but in other parts of the world. Eradication can produce short-term supply reductions, but they are not usually sustainable and often result in a series of unintended consequences that work to increase the motivation for the average Afghan farmer to continue growing poppy. Continuing eradication will increasingly alienate the rural population from the government, strengthen insurgent groups, and increase the time and resources needed to bring this problem to a manageable level. 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. 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