On Feb 22, 2009, at 12:54 PM, Chris Gehlker wrote: > > On Feb 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Charles Bennett wrote: > >> I'm not optimistic about this at all. >> >> Politically, Obama chastised Bush for ignoring Afghanistan (rightly >> so) but as Obama commits more and more troops into the region, and I >> think he must, >> it will become "Obama's war". (As in, be careful what you ask for, >> you just might get it) >> >> Personally, I think he is in a no-win situation, but I will grant >> that >> he is politically agile and has some goodwill stored up. > > We need to recognize inelastic demand. Every initial success we have > against the Taliban simply drives up the price of opiates and channels > more resources to them. > > The US has only one strategy for defeating the Taliban and that > involves greatly increasing the output of the legal poppy farms in > California and flooding North America and Europe with high quality > cheap or free heroin. We don't seem to have the political will to do > this.
It would go a long way towards the deficit/debt problem too, if we properly controlled demand. I'm worried that Mexico is going to beat us to the punch on this. I think they are very close to tossing out their government and replacing them with a more business oriented narcocracy (I should trademark the word..) > > > Fortunately, we don't need to defeat the Taliban. We just need to > reach an accommodation with then where they stop providing sanctuary > to as-Qaeda. I don't want to see the human rights abuses of the Taliban put back in place under any circumstance. > Obama's people and many in the military and even > conservative politicians versed in foreign policy seem to get this. The Afgan government has set a new standard for corruption and incompetence so it won't surprise me but it seems a damn shame to stand by and allow the women to be put back under the yoke. I'd rather see the money spent on killing Taliban. Seems like a good investment for all concerned. Since we think we can spend our way out of the problem, producing hellfire missiles could save the economy a million bucks a pop and will keep many people employed in the US manufacturing sector. The way I see it, just leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban would be passing up a great stimulus opportunity. =c= _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
