Earlier this week, the New York Times unloaded some big news about Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

I won’t excerpt the entire article here, but it’s an enlightening read. Karzai, of course, denies both the payments and his role in the drug trade. But while the payments are a revelation, it’s long been a not-so-well-kept secret that he profits from Afghanistan’s opium production. As I’ve mentioned before, when an industry accounts for over a 1/3 of nation’s GDP, the powerful are either part of that industry or they risk losing their power. This is the dilemma we continue to face in Afghanistan and it’s the reason why the Taliban has been resurgent.

In order to really understand the depths of this clusterfuck, it helps to go back to another piece in the NYT from last summer, by former State Department anti-narcotic official Thomas Schweich. Schweich’s piece was a masterpiece of utter delusion, which I’d initially discussed here. Even then, I only scratched the surface of how clueless this man was in describing his genuinely earnest efforts to rid Afghanistan of opium plants. Here he is discussing a 2006 meeting with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice:

I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication, although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But [President Hamid] Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash.

I’m not entirely sure how Schweich could’ve believed this considering that it was in December 2005 that a former coca grower named Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia – the first country aerial eradication was ever conducted – as a backlash against America’s drug eradication efforts. And President Karzai, a man who’d already survived several assassination attempts, wasn’t about to do anything that would guarantee that he’d have even more guns fixed on him. Unfortunately there was already a push within the Bush Administration to give Schweich the green light on carrying out his drug warrior fantasies. Part of that push was to send former Colombian Ambassador Anne Patterson to Afghanistan:

Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission. A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia, she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but the Pentagon strategy was “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business.

What Schweich fails to mention about Colombia (and Patterson pretends isn’t true) is that the overall amount of cocaine coming out of Colombia hadn’t changed much over Patterson’s time there. Instead, what happened was that pro-government right-wing paramilitaries just took over more of the trade as they were also gaining more influence within the Uribe government. The reason that FARC was losing out on drug profits was because the Colombian government was so utterly powerless to stop the corruption within the ranks of their own paramilitary supporters.

In Afghanistan, we’ve ended up with the same dynamic. Ahmed Wali Karzai’s paramilitary fights against the “narco-terrorists” in the Taliban for his brother’s government and NATO forces shrug off the fact that he’s just as involved in supplying the rest of the world with heroin. But as Schweich mentioned in his piece, the debates between Secretary of State Rice (who favored a stronger anti-drug push) and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (who didn’t want to get more involved with anti-drug efforts) were being won by Rice (with Bush being “the decider”). And despite continued push back from the Defense Department, more and more emphasis throughout Bush’s second term was being placed on trying to eradicate the opium plants.

One of the more puzzling moves in our time in Afghanistan was our prosecution of Haji Bashar Noorzai. Noorzai was an ally in southern Afghanistan who’d turned against the Taliban, but was lured to America (he believed he was coming to volunteer his help for American forces) and arrested for being a drug trafficker. He’s now serving a life sentence in an American jail. Nothing about this case ever really made sense, until the New York Times report from this week, which ended with this bit of information:

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

Even with this knowledge, the rationale behind our arrest and prosecution of Noorzai still makes no sense from a strategic standpoint, but it demonstrates how much power Ahmed Wali Karzai has that he could get us to undermine our nation building efforts in order to expand his own illegal activities – all while still being paid by the CIA. Either he’s a criminal mastermind of epic proportions or the people who were making decisions about how to wage that war were morons (and yes, I know which one it is).

Going back to Schweich’s article again, there’s one passage that’s just infuriating beyond belief:

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.

It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy, dumbass. When you take the largest industry in the country and make it illegal, you end up with a well-financed insurgency. And as you try harder and harder to eliminate that industry, a higher percentage of the profits will end up being concentrated among the people most unwilling to submit to your authority. And if you do it for long enough, those insurgents will eventually start taking over parts of the country, which is why thanks to our attempts to eliminate the opium trade, the Taliban have once again recaptured large parts of Afghanistan and record numbers of coalition troops are being killed.

The New York Times article from this week tends to make the CIA look incompetent or even reckless, but the story is more complex than that. It’s probably because when I think of CIA agents, I get a mental image of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War, but I can easily see them getting angry to the point of punching a wall over having to deal with people like Schweich and Patterson, whose boundless naivete drove the mission in Afghanistan into a hole. When I write about Afghanistan and what’s still possible to accomplish there, it’s easy to approach it from far too theoretical a perspective, without taking into account the damage that’s already been done. I’m done doing that. We’ve managed to fuck things up so spectacularly that anything other than a rapid withdrawal is a mistake. We simply don’t understand what we’re doing well enough to justify keeping a single soldier in that country.

And Go Phillies!

Raw Story reports on a discussion about legalizing marijuana that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

Last week’s contest was won by mlc1us. It was Stockholm, Sweden. And Roger, they drive on the right in Sweden, as does the rest of mainland Europe.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

CNN:

Afghan opium kills 100,000 people every year worldwide — more than any other drug — and the opiate heroin kills five times as many people in NATO countries each year than the eight-year total of NATO troops killed in Afghan combat, the United Nations said Wednesday.

About 15 million people around the world use heroin, opium or morphine, fueling a $65 billion market for the drug and also fueling terrorism and insurgencies: The Taliban raised $450 million to $600 million over the past four years by “taxing” opium farmers and traffickers, Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a report.

Not all the money is going into the pockets of rebels or drug dealers; some Afghan officials are making money off the trade as well, he said.

I’m amazed that it even needs to be pointed out that Afghan officials are making money off this trade. It accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of that nation’s GDP. Here in the US, the financial service and insurance industries account for less than 10% of our GDP, yet they’ve been able to use their financial clout to run our government for the past few decades.

In all of the discussions about what to do in Afghanistan, though, this topic hardly ever comes up. It’s central to how the Taliban have funded their resurgence, yet it’s treated as a sideshow – as if it were irrelevant to our ability to succeed there. It’s not. As long as the Taliban continues to profit from the trade, they will never be “defeated” by any Afghan government that is forced to treat the opium industry as a form of corruption that needs to be eradicated.

Thankfully, this CNN report was done by the excellent Christiane Amanpour, so there was actually a dissenting point of view to counter the “bury our heads in the sand and send in more troops” perspective:

The report offered little new in the way of possible solutions, said Ethan Nadelmann, founding executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes alternatives to the war on drugs.

“It’s very good at describing a problem,” he said. “But it truly is devoid of any kind of pragmatic solution, and it essentially suggests that the answer is to keep doing more of what’s failed us in the past.”

So long as there is a global demand for opium, there will be a supply, he said.

“If Afghanistan were suddenly wiped out as a producer of opium — by bad weather or a blight or eradication efforts — other parts of the world would simply emerge as new producers, “creating all sorts of new problems,” he said.

And Afghanistan itself would not be helped either, he said.

“You would see in Afghanistan millions of people probably flocking to the cities unable to make a living and probably turning more to the Taliban than they are now,” he said.

He listed three possible options. The first, global legalization and control, “is not happening, not any time soon,” he said.

The second option is to increase drug treatment for addicts who want it and to provide legal access to the drug, as Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Spain and Canada have done, he said.

“In all of these places, there are small, growing programs of heroin maintenance that allow addicts to obtain pharmaceutical-grade heroin from legal sources rather than from the black market,” he said.

But Nadelmann added that more people died of opiate overdose last year involving pharmaceutical opiates than died from illegal heroin.

A third possibility, he said, would be to view Afghanistan as essentially a red-light zone of global opium production and to think about the solution as a vice-control challenge, “which means acknowledge that Afghanistan is going to continue to be the world’s supplier of illegal opium for the foreseeable future and then focus on manipulating and regulating the market participants, even though it is still illegal.”

He added, “That, I think, is in some respects the de facto strategy, even though it cannot be stated openly, for political reasons.”

Dick Cheney can complain all he wants about Obama dithering, but it was his boss and their administration who were dithering about this problem for seven whole years instead of addressing it head on. The Bush Administration was warned repeatedly that trying to aggressively eradicate the opium trade would backfire and hand the country back over to the Taliban (even the European Parliament urged them to consider licensing the production). He didn’t listen and that’s exactly what happened.

Despite the long and storied history of empires meeting their demise in Afghanistan, I don’t believe that a humiliating defeat there is guaranteed. But even the most sophisticated counter-insurgency effort will fail unless we start to understand how the opium industry functions, why it exists, and the pitfalls of trying to remove it as part of that effort. As Nadelmann pointed out, our current strategy is starting to look more like one of tolerating the production while manipulating the participants. In the end, if we seek out some sort of agreement with the Taliban, that’s essentially what it will be – a deal with those who now control the opium trade. It may look like a defeat to people who’ve been conditioned to equate drug traffickers with terrorists, but it was the war itself that joined those two forces. When the Taliban were in power, they were also trying to eradicate the opium harvests. Making a deal with those who control the opium trade in order to isolate those whose main interest is fighting America is how we win there.

Dick Cheney giving advice on how to have an effective foreign policy is like Kayne West giving advice on proper etiquette at awards ceremonies.

How convenient for the South Park guys that when an actual dad in Colorado pulls off the most insane Randy Marsh imitation of all time, they’re right in the middle of making new episodes.

The Obama Administration has put down in writing their official policy on medical marijuana. They will no longer interfere with state medical marijuana laws. The most important benefit of this policy is that it opens the door for states to implement much more robust systems of production and distribution without interference from the DEA. Previously, states faced a dilemma in that the more regulation of a medical marijuana system that they created, the more paper trails there were for the DEA to take the whole thing down. That’s a big reason why California’s system ended up being such an unregulated mess. With this new policy, it will be easier for states to set it up the right way.

All of this may soon become moot because the tide is quickly turning towards allowing regulated sales to recreational users as well.

There isn’t a state-by-state breakdown, but this poll shows the same result seen in previous polls, that a majority of people on the west coast support full legalization. Of course, as we’ve learned with the public option, you need about 70-75% support for something before Democrats find the testicular fortitude to implement it.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. The location was Burlington, NJ.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

– Radley Balko and Publius from Obsidian Wings have been following the scandal involving Texas Governor Rick Perry’s attempts to cover up the fact that an innocent man was likely executed on his watch.

– It never ceases to amaze me how often people who rant about taxes and socialism try to invoke Thomas Paine. I think they just assume that because the American revolution was partly about taxes that Paine must think like tea-baggers do today, rather than as someone who used to loudly advocate for re-distributing wealth through progressive taxation.

– Bruce Mirken asks why Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley is doing so much to help out Mexican drug cartels? Law enforcement officials may be uncomfortable with those comparisons, but they’re undeniably true. Card carrying medical marijuana users in that county of over 10 million people are either going to obtain pot from local growers and local businessmen, or obtain it from gangs who are currently fighting the Mexican government. When you attack the local growers and local business, you automatically boost the profits of the gangs.

– I just very happily marked my ballot for Pete Holmes. The Stranger conducted a series of interviews with Holmes and his opponent, Tom Carr. The last one concerned marijuana arrests, which was somewhat funny because it consisted of Tom Carr spinning for several minutes about why his office is still pursuing marijuana cases, following by Pete Holmes making this very simple statement:

Whether standing alone or in conjunction with other charges, I will not charge another simple marijuana possession case. Period.

It’s that simple, Tom. And that’s why we want you out.

– Here’s a fascinating account from a mother who – after discussing it with her doctor – decided to treat her severely autistic son with medical marijuana. I’ve generally been averse to the idea of giving marijuana to children that age, but if it helps a child stop eating his own shirts, I think I’m ok with it.

American Violet is now available on DVD. I still haven’t seen it, but I’m hoping to check it out very soon.

In the comments of my last post about the epic saga of the empty jail in Hardin, Montana, Jason Osgood asks:

Is anyone else disturbed that a new jail was someone’s idea of economic development and jobs creation?

Yeah, me too. And while there was a lot in that story to gawk at, that was certainly a big one. Why the hell did a small town in Montana with no immediate need to house prisoners build a huge jail? TPM’s Justin Elliott looked into it:

But an investigation by TPMmuckraker into how Hardin ended up with the 92,000 square foot facility in the first place suggests that, long before “low-level card shark” Michael Hilton ever came to town, Hardin officials had already been taken for a ride by a far more powerful set of players: a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

Elliott shines a welcome light on the way private prisons make their money. Private corrections firms aren’t talked about much as one of the industries that have tremendous power in this country, but they should be. As America has become the world’s most prolific jailer, this is an industry that has been driving it and profiting from it.

One of the biggest misconceptions I hear when it comes to drug laws is that we can’t change them because of public opinion. This tends to be widely accepted as fact wherever you go, but it really isn’t true. Ron Paul continues to get re-elected in a conservative part of Texas every two years even though he has advocated for legalizing marijuana since the 1980s. The reality is that most people don’t pay much attention at all the drug war, and those who do overwhelmingly want it to end. Things like needle exchanges create mini-uproars from a small fringe of drug warriors, but after they’re enacted, they work exactly as expected to reduce the spread of diseases and no politician ever loses their job over them. Aside from small attempts to minimize the damage of drug prohibition, though, we still remain completely unable to shift away from one core aspect of the drug war – the idea that putting large numbers of people in prison will fix the problem.

This isn’t just a national mental block on the part of voters. We’re nearing a national majority of people being in favor of having marijuana sold legally to adults. In survey after survey, people tend to understand that putting people in jail for drug crimes doesn’t work. Instead, it’s the private corrections industry (and other special interests) that have a very strong interest in continuing the status quo. Prison overcrowding is their life-blood. The more people we arrest, the more prisons have to be built, and the more the American taxpayers can be soaked to house them all. This desire dovetails perfectly with the interests of law enforcement unions and prosecutors as well.

But in one way or another, all this insanity comes out of our pockets. Putting people in prison isn’t an investment. It produces nothing of value. In fact, it compounds taxpayer expenses in a number of ways, from the costs of trying to re-integrate former prisoners back into society to the downstream effects of having large numbers of single parent (or no parent) households in low-income communities. Putting people in prison should be seen as a necessary evil in society, an unavoidable side-effect of human nature that’s required to provide justice for the victims of crime. It shouldn’t be seen as an opportunity for government to invest in job creation. I believe that governments at all levels can and should provide stimulus for communities with high unemployment. But building a new prison that relies solely on the premise that we don’t have enough people locked up in our society already is the most counterproductive way of doing it.

A report was released last week showing that New York City’s menu labeling law hasn’t been working to get people to reduce their calorie intake. The study involved a number of fast food restaurants in low-income areas of the city. Receipts from before and after the calorie figures were posted were compared to receipts from a comparable low-income area in Newark, NJ, where there was no labeling at all. In the end, the researchers found that despite the fact that people reported seeing the calorie info and saying it influenced their decision-making, the average amount of calories ordered actually went up.

Those who oppose menu labeling laws are claiming victory, and while I’ve tended to agree with them that menu labeling isn’t going to influence most people’s eating habits, I think there’s a bigger picture here. And I think the issue is more than just about getting people to make better choices, it’s also about gravitating towards an end where people’s overall set of choices gradually improve by having the calorie information out in the open.

As for the study itself, I think it was way too narrow to draw any large conclusions. Lower-income people are those least likely to be concerned with calorie intake over price. In fact, the uptick in the amount of calories consumed might be happening because people get higher calorie items in the belief that they’re getting more for their money. It’s very possible that studies of higher-income consumers in different types of restaurants would show declines in caloric intake. On the other hand, the result of this survey requires some reconsideration of the meaning of previous surveys cited by labeling supporters that showed that people notice the calorie information and that it influences their decision-making. The New York study found the same thing – 90% of the people said so – yet it wasn’t leading to lower calorie choices in the end.

Where I tend to agree with supporters of menu labeling is that having the calorie information out in the open often spurs the restaurants themselves to provide healthier choices. As Corby Kummer notes here, Starbucks has already modified some of their higher-calorie items in response to the laws and even some fast food chains have been altering their menus. In the end, I see this as a worthwhile benefit to the labeling laws. While the vast majority of people aren’t going to change their eating habits, if restaurants are motivated to reduce the calorie counts of their offerings in various ways, there will certainly be a positive downstream effect of that.

That said, my concerns about menu labeling haven’t changed much either. Will these requirements be imposed on all food outlets, potentially making it difficult for smaller restaurants to comply – especially ones who rotate their menus a lot (in King County, the requirements only apply to large chains)? Will the calorie measurements themselves be accurate enough to be trusted? Are they simply inaccurate for places like Subway, where you custom make your own sandwich? None of those are serious enough concerns for me, but my main concern is what happens to restaurants with higher calorie items (because there’s legitimate demand for it) who then become targets for overzealous public health officials. When the supporters of menu labeling move from simply trying to inform people’s choices to trying to limit them is when I hop the fence and start yelling with the libertarians.

But unless that point is reached (and maybe I’m somewhat naive for not thinking it’s guaranteed to happen), I’m ok with having restaurants forced to post the calorie totals on menus. It doesn’t influence my decision-making now, but I realize that it might in the future. I think what rubs me the wrong way about the opposition to these laws is how overt the astroturf nature of it is. For instance, here’s a release on last week’s study from the Center for Consumer Freedom. They proudly refer to themselves as the most vocal opponent of New York’s menu labeling law. But why? Posting calorie counts doesn’t threaten consumer freedom in any way. In fact, provided that the counts are relatively accurate, it arguably expands consumer freedom, by giving people better information to make choices. But in the PR world, buzzwords like “consumer freedom” have often been used to make people feel like they’re fighting for their own liberty when in reality they’re fighting to keep corporations from having to do extra work.

From this point, I think there are two directions this can go. Either the public health advocates are right and restaurants will slowly improve the healthiness of their offerings, or the libertarians and the restaurant lobby are right and this is only the beginning of a more aggressive effort to make our choices for us.

Two weeks ago’s contest was won by YLB. The correct answer was Amsterdam.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

I missed a lot of posts here as I traveled, so this may have been covered already, but Rush Limbaugh is trying to buy the St. Louis Rams. In response, several black NFL players have said they would refuse to play in St. Louis. It’s hard to know how widespread that sentiment would be, whether it would affect their ability to sign free agents, or if it’s even possible for the Rams to be worse than they already are, but the NFL will certainly be thinking about that before the owners and league would approve any deal.

Having an owner with a well-known history of racism isn’t that unusual, even in sports with large numbers of black athletes. Marge Schott made enough racist comments when she inherited the Cincinnati Reds from her husband in the 1990s to get herself suspended by the league multiple times. Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, had to pay a multi-million dollar settlement after he was caught forcing black families out of the buildings he owned. While many players have lamented being stuck on the Clippers, few have openly complained about playing for a team run by someone with such a long record of racist behavior. It’s also possible that better players, who have somewhat more control over where they can play, are able to avoid playing for him. The Clippers have been one of the worst franchises in any of the four major North American sports leagues for several decades. That may not be because of Sterling’s racism, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

But Limbaugh may be a different story altogether. With his high profile and his increasing hostility towards Obama and everything associated with our country’s black communities, his presence alone may make it very difficult to assemble a competitive team in St. Louis again. At the very least, every time Limbaugh says something stupid, black players on the Rams will get sick of having to comment on it. It will be a distraction that players will quickly tire of. Unless he just stops saying ignorant things, which appears impossible for him at this point.

If the deal goes through, there would be one side benefit (other than the Seahawks continuing to have two easy wins every year). It would make it clearer to people that Rush Limbaugh is not some average dude railing against “elites”. He’s an extremely fucking rich guy. And while there are large numbers of people who will never figure out that Limbaugh’s shtick has been to get rich by fueling the kind of partisan (and often racist) nonsense that pitted Americans against each other, the fact that he’s now one of the “elites” who sits in a luxury box watching his NFL team play makes it easier for those outside of his listening audience to see him for the fraud he is.