The 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) AK
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.
It’s impossible to win the war on drugs and the war on terror @ the same time
Longley 10 (Robert, About.com, http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/waronterror/a/afghanpoppy.htm, date accessed: 6/21/2010) AK
According to the ODCP, the "challenging security situation" in Afghanistan has complicated the task of fighting a war against drugs and war on terrorism at the same time. As the terrorists lose ground, the opium poppy growers win, and much of the money from Afghanistan's opium sales goes right back to the terrorists.m"Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is a major and growing problem," said John Walters, Director of the ODCP. "Drug cultivation and trafficking are undermining the rule of law and putting money in the pocket of terrorists. The drug trade is hindering the ability of the Afghan people to rebuild their country and rejoin the international community. It is in the interest of all nations, including our European partners, to help the Karzai government fight the drug trade."
Stability Advantage – Heg Module
Losing the war on terror causes loss of legitimacy of American power- destroys heg
Crenshaw 6 (Martha, Prof of Govt @ Wesleyan U, p. 5, 2-10-6, Real Institute Elcano) ET
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.
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
Share with your friends: |
