https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/428/opiumpr.shtml

Although opium production is expected to increase this year despite efforts by the West and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to suppress it, the US State Department has a plan to turn defeat into victory. Well, not actual victory, but one almost as good: convincing the American and international public the policy is working.

	incised papaver specimens (opium poppies)

According to a Wednesday report in the Washington Times, the State Department has developed a public relations plan that seeks to convince "US domestic audiences as well as the international community" that the West and the Afghans have come up with a way to stop the march of the opium poppy across Afghanistan, home to nearly 90% of the global poppy crop.

The nine-page "Strategic Communication Plan" obtained by the Times seeks to specifically target Congress members, religious leaders, state elected officials, think tanks, media outlets, university students and officials, and the business community, both inside and outside the US. "All of us recognize that security in Afghanistan ultimately affects the stability of the countries surrounding it and eventually the international community as a whole," the plan said. "The strategy is based on the well-established premise that criminal enterprise in Afghanistan, left unchecked, undermines all worthy goals the country has set up for itself so its people may prosper and live in a peaceful society."

The plan calls for big efforts to ensure that journalists are given every opportunity to figure out and report the official line. It calls for journalists to be escorted on eradication missions, regular bulletins for the press "assuming poppy eradication goes well," and "professionally designed" press kits with fact sheets "that can last for several months." The department would also provide "on call" experts to hit the road in the US and abroad to "deliver the Afghanistan messages on Afghanistan."

Taking journalists on eradication missions would "foster awareness that without effective narcotics control," Afghanistan's social, economic, political and cultural objectives "are threatened and cannot be properly implemented." The plan would demonstrate that Afghanistan and the West have "an integrated and coherent counter-narcotics strategy."

Even if they don't.

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