This seems so absurd it's hard to believe it's not satire.

As your friend says, we know not only from our own experience, but from that of Mexico, that killing drug lords does not lead to any kind of victory in the 'war on drugs'. As if our soldiers didn't have enough to do there; as if our generals aren't asking for more and more troops. I don't get it. It's too crazy. This has to be a joke.

... with the object of causing so much trouble that pipelines cant be built through afghanistan, it looks like a winner.

we're supposed to blame stupidity or hubris or wrongheadedness for "unintentional consequences", except that the consequences we get are exactly what the planners intended...

...for instance, we need so much commotion in afghanistan, balochistan and pakistan that pipelines cant be built to china, pakistan and india... that energy is supposed to go to "western civilization".

but nobody can admit that, so we're supposed to believe that the trouble that interferes with pipeline construction is all a horrible mistake.

the root problem being: the planners have to disguise the fact that global energy supplies are getting so tight that 9/11 was staged to get a jump on grabbing control of energy.

Listen to your friend:
'Gee, let’s kill the top terrorists?' Sounds smart at first glance, but.........what do you think will happen after few of the top leaders are bumped off? Answer: others will compete to take their places.

We need to fix our Foreign Policy.

Well, if the lesson was not learnt in Colombia, and now in Mexico, I guess it will never be learnt.

However, professor Walt, what is the rationale behing building more US military bases in Colombia. Is that a lack of realism or what?

Lots of money waited, for what? "drugtraffick and terrorism"? Come on guys-----Latin America is not important neither dangerous enough. Just more fuel for antiamericanism

Well, you are probably right on the effectiveness of the tactic, but not the reason for it. The reason for the War on Drugs is to lower the amount of drugs entering the US. The killing of Afghan drug lords is to stop the flow of money to the Taliban. We will never stop the growing of poppy unless we resort to Taliban like methods (ironic that they are now funded by something they outlawed), but we might convince tribes that using their profits to support the Taliban is not a good idea.

Yes but if the goal is to shore up support for the Karzai regime why not then kill those drug lords who don't swear loyalty to Kabul. Like in the time of Taliban rule; the drug trade will be strictly controlled by regime allies, prices will rise as competition declines, another benchmark (lower drug production) will be met and those regions will be pacified by inducing war lords to play ball to get a cut of the drug action. From a realist perspective it's ironic that the United States would try to purse a goal of ending opium production in Afghanistan when experience teaches its access to profits made from the drug trade (not production but trafficking) that any regime would like to gain control over so as to buy off key constituents.

From a realist perspective it's ironic that the United States would try to purse a goal of ending opium production in Afghanistan.

Except, I don't think the goal is to end drug production. The goal is to send a signal to opium growers--don't give money to the Taliban. Whether this will work is another matter, but it is not analogous to the war on drugs.

"Targeted until proven innocent" is the US foreign policy, btw.

e.g. the absolutely fictitious Iranian nuclear weapons program.

This would be so much easier if they would just buy the poppies en masse directly from the farmers (completely cutting the Taliban out of the system), which would also double as a means of injecting money into Afghanistan's economy. Apparently MI6 suggested buying the entire poppy crop, according to Ahmed Rashid's latest book, and it's a real pity that they never took it seriously.

Hell, it's not like they're producing cocaine - those poppies and the opiates they make have legitimate markets and products that they could be applied for. Instead, they're lining the pockets of the Taliban and countless other black market middlemen.

What do you think of this? In a peasant based insurgency, the side that is least effective politically will be the side that escalates its military actions. In addition, the side that then escalates the military actions will lose the conflict.

The interlaced networks of drug merchants, government politicians and warlord factions represent the political system in Afghanistan. We have rejected meaningful attempts to penetrate and recruit within this system. If we continue this behavior, we will lose.

Bob Spencer

It's always a mistake to project domestic hot button items on to other countries. Whatever one might think about the WOD in the US context, the current situation is entirely different.

Referring to the NYT article itself, the headline is : U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban. All thru the article, there are caveats that this is not a generic WOD, but an extension of the war on the Taliban. The money quote is : "Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman ... said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.” "

So the NYT article goes at great lengths to say this is NOT a WOD, yet you attribute that article, and call it a WOD.

Heroin is probably the only cash crop Afghanistan has. Obviously killing drug lords has little effect, so another option is to make the product worthless. This can be done by making tons of it available to Europe and Asia. Just drop it in surreptitiously. Feed the addicts with lots of free smack. Dealing with the medical problem might be easier and cheaper than the continuous war senario.

And why shouldn't we use the same strategy in Afganistan that the DEA uses for the US? After all, its has worked so well. Thank god for the DEA, or the US might have a drug problem.
Ahem....

The impoverished will do what they have to, to stay alive and feed their children.
Until they have access to other markets, the farmers are not given much choice.