Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Define Success


Harper will accept nothing less than success in Afghanistan

Cheney also cautioned there is a tough road ahead. "We are still in the fight in Afghanistan and we're likely to be for some considerable period of time," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Define success. Define considerable period of time. Define our mission in Afghanistan. Canadians want to know. As the Toronto Star found out Voices: Afghan mission

Define the clash of civilizations which lead to this...
The start of a long war?

Success can't be defined as nation building when the government is really a City State with Karzai as Mayor. Canadians are being a sold a bill of goods that reconstruction has occurred, that the Taliban are the only warlords that are the problem and that the people like us. They really like us.

The only success in Afghanistan for the past five years has been this....


A Poor Yield For Afghans' War on Drugs

Poppy farming, banned in 2000 by the Taliban administration that U.S.-led forces overthrew the following year, quickly revived after the establishment of a U.N.-backed government and has been spreading rapidly ever since. It now accounts for more than half the country's gross national income and provides the raw material for about 75 percent of the world's heroin.

"It's become an industrial production," said Doris Buddenberg, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime here, noting that Afghanistan's opium output this year was a staggering 6,700 tons. Rural poverty, dashed hopes for economic recovery, Taliban blandishments and anti-government sentiment "all added up to more families deciding to grow poppy," she said.

But anti-drug officials and experts here say the expansion of drug smuggling and refining is a far more pernicious problem than poppy farming and could easily turn Afghanistan into another Colombia.

"Our main problem is these former commanders and warlords who are still in power. Now they are district chiefs and local police," said Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadaat, head of the anti-narcotics police force. "The drug mafia is getting more powerful day by day, and the only support we have is from the international community. The senior authorities not only do not cooperate, they get in our way."

And I don't think that was what Harper meant by success.


See:

Afghanistan





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