https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/429/souderagain.shtml

Leading congressional drug warrior Mark Souder is taking the Bush administration to task for not being tough enough against the Afghan opium industry. Souder, head of the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, visited Afghanistan last week, and on Monday, he said the Pentagon's reluctance to embrace aerial spraying of Afghan fields with herbicides was creating an "an international disaster" because profits from the drug trade fueled terrorism.

	war-torn Afghanistan (photo by Drug War Chronicle editor Phil Smith)

Opium is the economic mainstay of Afghanistan, accounting for more than a third of the national economy, according to the United Nations. The country supplies nearly 90% of the world's opium, from which heroin is made. The UN estimates the trade generated more than $2 billion for traffickers and $600 million for Afghan farmers last year. By all accounts, powerful political figures -- from parliamentarians to warlords -- within the Afghan government are linked to the trade.

US and British policy is to eradicate opium poppies by hand -- a gradualist tactic that attempts to balance the conflicting imperatives of the war on terror and the war on drugs in Afghanistan. Massive eradication could drive peasant farmers and others who benefit from the trade into the waiting hands of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, whose insurgency based in safe havens in the no man's land of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier is becoming more violent.

But for Souder, agape after viewing the poppy fields of Helmand province, this year's opium leader, there was no room for such subtleties -- or, apparently, for a distinction between a plant and a drug derived from it. "I had no conception of this much heroin," he said. "Heroin as far as the eye can see. Miles. And miles. And miles. This is an international disaster." The manual eradication approach of the US and British governments is "an ill-conceived strategy predetermined to massive failure," Souder said. "They are losing control of the country -- rapidly."

Souder blamed the Pentagon for the US's "soft" no-spraying eradication policy. "Our State Department has been overruled by our military division," he said. "I think it's driven a lot by the fact that our military and the British military believe that we can't ever win drug issues, and it's not traditional a military battle." Souder said he told the chief of staff of the commanding US general the military was shirking its duty. "Americans and people all over the world are dying because you won't spray," Souder said he said. "Furthermore, our soldiers and people from my district are here right now fighting in a war" against people whose weapons are purchased with drug money.

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