With General McChrystal resigning from the war on Afghanistan, Americans are remembering we have a war in Afghanistan. A few are even wondering why we are losing, or at least not winning.
A big problem that American politicians see in the war is the drug-lords who can use drug money to fight our troops. They can also use their drug connections to influence any Afghan politician who is using drugs. If we could just identify the Afghan politicians who are using drugs the war would turn around.
People who have been to Afghanistan have come up with a pretty simple test to check if an Afghan is using drugs, Are they from Afghanistan? If so they are probably on drugs.
Pretty much from the time of the Civil War America has been the most anti recreational drug country on Earth, and during the 40 year, “War on Drugs” we have gotten more so. Despite the direct costs of roughly $77 Billion dollars a year to the US Government the number of people who have used drugs remains about 85%. That’s in the US where there is a pretty heavy social stigma against drug use.
In Afghanistan everyone uses drugs bringing the War on Drugs to them is stupid. If we haven’t won that fight over here, how on Earth are we going to stop the Afghan’s from using drugs?
Still destroying the drug trade in Afghanistan is one of the goals in the war. Since nobody has a realistic idea of how to do that the war is lost as long as that remains a goal.
The war in Afghanistan is already the longest in US history. How much longer will we need to be over there pushing a program that hasn’t worked in the US and certainly won’t work in a place where the entire culture has evolved around the use of recreational drugs.
We could easily win the war in Afghanistan if we decided to admit defeat in the War on Drugs. If recreational drugs like Marijuana were to become legal in the US the Afghan drug lords would be fighting to be our allies so they could take advantage of that market.
It would also help the US economy as when you start taking in tens of billions in tax revenue, and hundreds of billions in savings on the Wars on Drugs and Afghanistan pretty soon you are talking real money.
By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts
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2 comments:
85%? Seriously?
I find that hard to swallow. Does that include alcohol and cigarettes? Caffeine (if the latter, we might hit 100%).
Thats the CIA stat for people who have used an illegal drug at least once in their life.
When you get into the people who have used an illegal drug in the last year it drops to the low 20%.
I used the at least once in their life stat because the aim of the "War on Drugs" is to stop people from starting, in that it has clearly failed.
The people that have used within the last year has gone down a couple percent in the last 40 years but at a huge cost.
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