We’ve had enough of those pesky poppies in Afghanistan:
The U.S. military bombed about 300 tons of poppy seeds in a dusty field in southern Afghanistan Tuesday in a dramatic show of force designed to break up the Taliban’s connection to heroin.
The air strike occurred mid-day in Helmand province and was observed by CNN’s Ivan Watson, who is embedded with the U.S. Marines operating in that province.
The military dropped a series of 1,000-pound bombs from planes on the mounds of poppy seeds and then followed with strikes from helicopters.
That’s right, we dropped “a series” of half-ton bombs on a pile of seeds. Then, apparently because those stubborn seeds hadn’t learned their lesson yet, the helicopters were brought in to completely break their will. Kidding aside, here was the real explanation for this exercise in elaborate destruction:
Tony Wayne, with the U.S. State Department, said the strikes on poppy seeds, that can be used to make opium and heroin, is part of a strategy shift for the military to stop the Taliban and other insurgents from profiting from drugs.
Uhhhh, ok.
So there have been changes recently to our strategy for combatting the opium trade. We’re no longer eradicating opium fields – a move that has done nothing more than impoverish farmers and drive them to the Taliban. Instead, we’re targeting more high level traffickers and trying to root out corruption. We’re also attempting to get Afghan farmers to grow alternate crops.
These strategies will have various levels of short-term success. Those successes will be highly publicized in the media, even as very little will change in the overall picture. As we take out traffickers and corrupt officials, new traffickers will take their place and raise enough money from the heroin trade to be able to corrupt more government officials. And as we are successful at moving some farmers away from growing opium, new ones will take their place (often forced by traffickers and corrupt government officials). In a country where the opium trade is small and the state has some semblance of centralized power, a strategy like this might make a difference over time. In a country like Afghanistan, where the trade in poppies is over 1/3 of the national GDP, and where the central government of Hamid Karzai (whose own brother is involved in the trade) has little power over much of the nation, it likely won’t work for decades, if at all.
So I’m not sure what Wayne thinks this bombing exercise will accomplish. Did they take a bunch of captured drug traffickers to the bombing site and taunt them by saying “look what we’re doing to your precious seeds!”? And even if they did, so what? I’ve occasionally seen news reports that try to equate participating in the opium trade as being a similar dynamic to an actual addiction to heroin, as if people who make money from the trade aren’t people making rational decisions to violate the law to make shitloads of money, but people with a drug problem who can’t help themselves. But there’s no chemical or psychological attachment to those seeds. It’s a commodity that the traffickers have to replace. To them, once American forces confiscate those seeds, it doesn’t matter whether we blow them up or put them on our bagels. They’re gone and they’ll have to find new ones.
There just isn’t a logical explanation for why you would rain massive bombs from the sky like this onto plant matter. It’s just a sign of utter frustration. It reminds me of the scene in Office Space where the three fed-up mouse jockeys take a baseball bat to the printer that never worked right:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfCYzJAgwrw[/youtube]
The frustration is certainly warranted. Afghanistan will remain a no-win situation as long as international drug policies (which have been overwhelmingly dictated by the U.S. over the years) continue to keep the demand for heroin so high and as long as our fragile relations with nations like Iran and Pakistan force us into this failing strategy. But it would be hard to think of a single thing that’s more strategically backwards than this. The Afghan population already thinks we’re too eager to employ aerial bombings. I don’t think bombing a pile of seeds in air raid fashion is a good way to reverse that image. In fact, it makes us look crazy. And perhaps we are.
They start by bombing poppy seeds. Then it’ll be sesame seeds, onion and garlic fields, and salt mines. The only bagels left available will be plain and blueberry
The only bagels left available will be plain and blueberry
I don’t like blueberries. I’ll drop a bomb on those. :)
This is YOUR President doing this futile bombing. You fuckers own this now.
Actually, while BOMBING the seeds isn’t a great idea it’s absolutely imperative that the poppy problem be dealt with. The Taliban survives because of 1) control of the poppies and 2) the madrassas along the Pakistani border. Think of FARC in Columbia. For many in Eastern Afghanistan growing poppies is the only way to survive. Since the Taliban controls heroin production, the local population becomes linked to the Taliban. This gives the people a vested interest in supporting the Taliban and also gives a hefty boost to recruitment.
I’m not disagreeing with you per se, I’d just hate anyone to get the impression that the poppies aren’t important. In the absence of drug law reform, the next best thing the US can do is attempt to build up national infrastructure in the big poppy areas and, hopefully, give the farmers something else to grow.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t a 1000 lb bomb kick up one hell of a dust cloud… a dust cloud now filled with poppy seeds? You can’t stop the spread of poppies by spreading poppy seeds.
And crusader, sorry but this shit still belongs to your boys Bush and Cheney. If we would have stayed in Afghanistan and finished the job instead of packing up and going into Iraq, we wouldn’t be bombing flower seeds.
this shit is all yours, gooper. You can’t blame us for the catbox when you own the cat.
Here’s a multiple choice question, that almost everyone gets wrong: Under which President was the Federal War on Drugs started? Was it:
A) Ronald Reagan?
B) Richard Nixon?
C) FDR?
D) Woodrow Wilson?
E) Ulysses Grant?
The answer is D) Woodrow Wilson. in 1914. With the signing of the Harrison Narcotics Act into law.
19-effin’-14, people. So, when are we gonna win this here ‘War on Drugs’?
By making it illegal, Uncle Sam made dope more valuable than gold before the credit meltdown, and it’s laundered dope money keeping a great many big-shot banks afloat. Bombing some poppy field won’t do jack. If anything, it might make dope more profitable than it already (artificially!) is.
It was silly and stupid, like the rest of the misbegotten DrugWar’s been for its near-century of existence. A net loss to the economy, as all it does is eats money and sh*ts out prisons…which need more money. And now we’re bombing poppy fields, sure to rile the locals and drive more of them to ally with the Taliban. Real smart, that.
Idiocracy, anyone? Sure feels like it when it comes to drugs…
We didn’t deploy the F-22s for this job? What a perfect opportunity to showcase the most technologically advanced military jet ever built, even though it probably wouldn’t have been able to fly through the dust cloud without requiring an extra 54019.32786 hours of maintenance. But still, F-22, BITCHES!
And Junior Troll Crusader is as utterly clueless as ever. Was that all you could think up and type out before Mommy told you to go back to bed?
EPIC FAIL!
Now here’s a stupidly obvious idea to curb the illegal opium trade: so long as there are farmers growing opium poppies, and there’s still quite a bit of need around the world for legal opiod pain-medicines and anaesthetics, why in the hell is someone in the Afghan government (financed by pharma and closely supervised by the US and NATO) not getting out the word that the government will offer more money for their crops than the Taliban, and provide protection for those farmers who do sell their crops to those who would use the opium for perfectly legitimate medical purposes?
Considering now that we have real live adults in charge of things here and in Europe, and more troops on the ground in Afghanistan, I’d think that this would have a reasonable chance of working. This would also give the opportunity to try to wean famers off of growing opium and grow more beneficial crops. The only things needed are funding and patience.
Long time ago someone sugested that the solution to the opium problem in Afghanistan would be to license Afghan farmers to produce it. That of course was ignored. Too simple.
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David @ 5: I was wondering the same thing. Next spring there’s probably going to be a huge wild poppy field spreading for several miles around the bombing site. Maybe somebody just wanted to get in some practice runs using live ordinance, and the poppy seeds were the only thing they could get approval to bomb?
And I have to confess that I don’t know the first thing about how poppy seeds get made into heroin, but couldn’t the seeds have been trucked out and converted to a useful purpose, like making millions of poppy-seed muffins? Get the Costco buyer on the phone!!!!
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And don’t forget the WSP on homeland security detail clubbing those Taliban-loving seagulls….
The seeds aren’t the problem. You don’t make heroin from the seeds — you make it from the sap in the seed pod head before the seeds are fully formed. So if they bombed seeds the sap had already been extracted and was probably 1/2 way to being processed and on our streets. Idiots!
Hey Darryl, Puddy saved his comments
@17
Good for you, now go find an Open Thread and sound like an uneducated boob there.
12:
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude.
Those would be some freakin’ awesome muffins.