Afghan jihad update -- an attack in a hotbed of "insurgency" and drug trafficking, which is a chief means of the financing of the jihad. From AP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A bomb killed four Afghan intelligence agents when it blew up under their vehicle as they were driving near a southern provincial capital Saturday, officials said.Included among the dead was a district intelligence chief in Helmand province, a hotbed of the insurgency and the booming illicit trade in opium and heroin, said Asadullah Sherzad, the provincial commander of the National Security Directorate.
The attack occurred about 10 miles south of Lashkargah, the provincial capital, as the men were driving toward the city in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he said. The bomb planted on a road was detonated by remote control.
Afghan, the forgotten war.
"drug trafficking, which is a chief means of the financing of the jihad."
Got any stats on this? So cracking down on drugs is an important anti-Islamist measure?
Lillith-
Opium poppies grow almost anywhere with little cultivation or water, and the financial returns are astonshingly good compared to any other cash crop able to be harvested in harsh Afghanistan.
What I have emailed to the
president@whitehouse.gov
many times is the question:
-Why don't we just let the Afghanis grow the crap, then buy it from them at harvest time, truck it away, use what little is needed for the world's medical morphine supplies, and burn the rest? Year after year.
The Afghanis would then make enough money to rebuilt their country. The drug crop would stay off the Mafia market -and out of al-Qaeda's mitts- and we would look like the reasonable, money-dispensing good guys.
Every other plan has failed.
Is it just puritannical "drugs are bad, bad, bad!" hysterical silliness and stupidity, and anti-enlightened-self-interest, and robotic numbskullery, that keeps us from doing this simple, practical, EFFECTIVE thing?
We prefer to alienate and further-impoverish the average, poor Afghani farmer?
And drive them into the arms of drug lords from Sicily and Marseilles or Shanghai -or, even worse, into the clutches of the jihadist financiers from Saudi Arabia or Bin laden's camp, itself?
Our current strategy is a failed drug.
Named:
Folly! FOLLY!! FOLLY!!!