The NYT's shitty drug war coverage

Despite the paper's supposedly liberal slant, the New York Times' drug reporting is oddly deferential to the government's pro-drug war line, and its reporting suffers either as a cause or an effect. Though they line their articles with caveats and doubts, they spend the bulk of their time repeating the claims of the government, and don't seem to look very far to find opposing point of views to include.

Take as an example this article in Saturday's paper about Afghanistan's poppy problem. While opium poppy has been a lucrative crop in Afghanistan for decades, a recent combination of disease and poor weather has stunted this season's yield, shrinking it by as much as half. Rather than a sober discussion of opium's next season (which, let's face it, are good), the Times' C.J. Chivers article starts out by telling us that there's a chance that within months, the shift away from opium is going to begin.

The first paragraph that essentially tells us that Afghan opium farmers have never had it this bad (doubt it). In the second we learn that apparently there's also some program run by the US Marines, and as a result "the start" of a shift away from opium "could be possible" within mere months:

As farmers around Marja, the heart of Afghanistan’s opium industry, confront harsh environmental conditions and new interdiction efforts, they are also receiving offers of aid in exchange for growing different crops. Both they and the military said that the start of a shift to other sources of income could be possible by the end of this year, when poppy planting would resume.

In the third we get a generic affirmation and a rebuttal (opium prices are up because of the shortage). The next few arguments are non-novel and pretty general ones for and against the program's success, and slowly the reader gets the impression that there isn't anything more to learn about the specific programs, and moves on, with the impression that there's a vague government program that might help rid Afghanistan of heroin.

So it's a huge surprise that half way through the second online page we learn that, in fact, an unknown but potentially huge portion of this program that's supposed to transition farmers from opium to legal crops is a huge sham:

Assessing the program’s effect remains difficult. In many cases, according to Marines on patrols who had to verify that poppy fields were destroyed, farmers were paid based on estimates of a field’s size, which Afghans often inflated.

Marines and poppy farmers also agreed that many farmers waited until the end of the season to register for payments. Then they quickly harvested their opium, plowed under the stalks and collected payments nonetheless.

“That was the only bad thing,” said Cpl. David S. Palmer, who led the squad that provided security for the verification team. “A lot of people were double-taking on us, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

The only bad thing indeed. But never fear, because it's the thought that counts – in the next too many paragraphs we learn that it's an important "stepping stone," it might be working because "what began as a trickle of cooperative farmers...became a busy queue," the program's helping them "reseize the moment," it's providing "much-needed assistance to some of the poorest people in the world," and the "ultimate hope" is peace and a drug-free Afghanistan. Oh yeah, and "[t]he Taliban’s murder and intimidation program is still ongoing." But don't worry, because "through the subsidies, groups of farmers have begun to meet and cooperate with the Americans and Afghan troops."

No real background or reference about past efforts at anti-poppy campaigns, and no citation of any critical voices. And obviously the copy editor wasn't paying attention, because the giant gaping hole in the subject of the article isn't even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through a two-page articles. Let's give it up for another drug war hack job from the New York Times.

The Taliban never really banned opium

I often hear about the Taliban's short-lived ban on opium cultivation in 2000, but according to this paper (pdf), the ban likely had nothing to do with religion, morals, or international pressure:

Under the ban, poppy cultivation was reduced by more than 90 percent; it continued to flourish only in areas controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces.

Though the West initially applauded the Taliban’s about-face as a sign of a new willingness to join the international community, the enthusiasm was probably premature. Analysts now believe that the Taliban had a large stockpile of opium and heroin on hand from previous years of bountiful production, and that the ban was simply an attempt to use Afghanistan’s monopoly power to raise prices in a weak market.

It looks likely only a profit motive can stop Afghanistan's heroin exports.

Hamid Karzai on drugs

Hamid Karzai, apparently, has a "fondness" for opium/heroin. Which he probably buys from his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputed to be the nation's biggest drug dealer.

Hamid Karzai's hat's waning fortunes

I didn't know this, but apparently Hamid Karzai's iconic hat had a lot of political and cultural relevance:

Known as a karakul hat, and made of the pelt of fetal or newborn lambs of the karakul breed of sheep, traditionally it was something worn by Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. When Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the turban-wearing south, took office in 2002, the karakul hat was part of his attempt to devise a wardrobe that was Afghan rather than ethnic or regional.

It was a move widely praised at the time, in Afghanistan and abroad. The American designer Tom Ford called the Afghan president “the chicest man on the planet.” Afghans looking for national symbols after decades of ethnic strife inspired a brisk trade in the hats, made of lambskins from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and fashioned by Kabul’s hatters, whose shops lined both sides of Shah-e-do Shamshera Wali Road.

Evidently the hat's fortunes have waned along with Hamid Karzai's.

In any case, all the better for the poor lambs:

The more expensive ones are made from the skins of lambs taken from the pregnant ewe just before birth, by cutting open her abdomen, sometimes while she is still alive. Less costly are those made from lambs killed immediately after delivery; because karakul sheep are extremely protective of their young, that often means slaughtering both together, or forcibly separating them.

Markets in everything: unwitting drug smuggling decoys

RFE/RL reports from the Afghan-Tajik border:

Here, ordinary villagers can be "sold" across the border by drug smugglers without warning. And once they are sold, they may not return for decades.

The "selling" -- as the villagers call it -- works very simply. Smugglers hire the victim to carry a package of drugs, wittingly or unwittingly, across the border. Then, they tip off the Tajik border police to arrest him.

The man and the drugs in the package are the small sacrifices the smugglers make to keep authorities away from their larger-scale shipments.

Naturally, the police are in on it. Kind of a grander version of the big city beat cop arresting a bunch of small time dealers to meet quota and distract from the pay-offs he's getting from the neighborhood gang. In fact, the practice may have its roots in American-style drug war:

The charade also helps explain why despite millions of dollars of Western aid for the regional drug war – including more than $37 million from Washington to help Tajik law enforcement since 1992 – smuggling continues unabated across the border.

I suspect that the intended audience for these arrests is the Americans.

On a totally unrelated note, I liked this bit from the opening of the article:

Even the poor can eke out a living along the highway, filling in potholes with sand in return for small change thrown by passing truck drivers.

The Nobel laureate's land war in Asia

Thoreau, with what has to be the best one-liner about Obama's Nobel:

...the Nobel Peace Prize was just accepted by a man currently escalating a land war in Asia.

Kabul's wedding singer district

Apparently, in Kabul, there's a "wedding singer district" – or at least a part of a street – where you can insist on a live demonstration before hiring someone to sing at your wedding. Jan Chipchase's blog is always pretty interesting – he's a UI researcher for Nokia who travels the world in search of novel uses of technology, from high and low.

Oops! – Afghanistan's VP is a drug lord and we knew it all along

The NYT on Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, former secretary of defense and potential new vice president:

But by 2002, C.I.A. intelligence reports flowing into the Bush administration included evidence that Marshal Fahim was involved in Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade, according to officials discussing the reports and the internal debate for the first time.

He had a history of narcotics trafficking before the invasion, the C.I.A. reports showed. But what was most alarming in the reports were allegations that he was still involved after regaining power and becoming defense minister. He now had a Soviet-made cargo plane at his disposal that was making flights north to transport heroin through Russia, returning laden with cash, the reports said, according to American officials who read them. Aides in the Defense Ministry were also said to be involved. [...]

Some United States officials in Washington and Kabul argued that there was no smoking gun proving his involvement in narcotics trafficking, and thus no need to break off contact with him. And eventually, the Bush administration hit on what officials thought was a solution: American military trainers would be directed to deal only with subordinates to Marshal Fahim, and not Marshal Fahim himself.

That would at least give the Bush administration the appearance of complying with the law.

Interestingly, there was a period when it seems that Karzai kicked Fahim out of the most obvious positions of power, which the NYT writer seems to think was to win an ethnic bloc in the coming election:

By late 2003, officials said, the Bush administration began to realize its mistake, and initiated what officials called its “warlord strategy” to try to ease key warlords out of power. Marshal Fahim remained defense minister until 2004 and was briefly Mr. Karzai’s running mate as vice president in elections that year, but Mr. Karzai then dropped him.

Marshal Fahim remains a powerful figure among Tajiks, the ethnic group in north Afghanistan, and Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, calculated that an alliance with the general would help him increase his support in northern Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's unprecedented corruption

From the NYT, more evidence that the Brits were right earlier this year when they said that the best hope for Afghanistan at this point is to leave an "acceptable dictator" in power:

On the streets here, tales of corruption are as easy to find as kebab stands. Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person’s freedom. The examples mentioned above — $25,000 to settle a lawsuit, $6,000 to bribe the police, $100,000 to secure a job as a provincial police chief — were offered by people who experienced them directly or witnessed the transaction.

People pay bribes for large things, and for small things, too: to get electricity for their homes, to get out of jail, even to enter the airport.

Governments in developing countries are often riddled with corruption. But Afghans say the corruption they see now has no precedent, in either its brazenness or in its scale. Transparency International, a German organization that gauges honesty in government, ranked Afghanistan 117 out of 180 countries in 2005. This year, it fell to 176.

“Every man in the government is his own king,” said Abdul Ghafar, a truck driver. Mr. Ghafar said he routinely paid bribes to the police who threatened to hinder his passage through Kabul, sometimes several in a day.

Brit: leave an "acceptable dictator" in Afghanistan

Someone leaked a "coded" diplomatic cable to the French satirical/investigative (??) newspaper Le Canard enchaîné (whose website proudly informs would-be readers that the Canard deals only "avec du papier journal et de l'encre"), in which the British ambassador to Afghanistan says that essentially, the war is lost. He says not only do foreign troops only prolong the inevitable chaos before order emerges, but that increased military presence will have the "perverse effect" of creating more violence. In the cable, which was written by the deputy French ambassador and is a summary of what the British ambassador told him, British ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles says the western forces should leave "an 'acceptable dictator' in charge of the country within five to 10 years," whatever that means.

Is heroin really that bad after all?

The NYT Magazine this weekend has an article about Afghanistan's poppy problem written by an American drug warrior entitled "Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?". The article chronicles the failure of the anti-poppy efforts, and the author concludes – in the words of Jacob Sullum – that the problem "is everyone else's fault." But what I find most interesting about the article is that its premise – that "the evils of heroin" are truly evil – is uncritically accepted from the get-go, and the author doesn't even feel the need to explain why heroin is so evil. So, I'll try to take a stab.

First of all, heroin is expensive. Drug addicts end up having to steal and do other unscrupulous things (prostitution, perhaps?) to acquire the drug. But why is it expensive? Because it's illegal.

Second of all, intravenous drug use can lead to diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. Why? Because users share needles. Why do users share needles? Because it's illegal to get them without a prescription, and in America, having a heroin addiction won't get you a prescription.

Thirdly, heroin is notoriously impure. Dealers cut it with all sorts of things, including things much more deadly than heroin itself. Pure heroin is virtually impossible to overdose on, especially for the addicted user. The vast majority of deaths due to "overdoses" are actually deaths due to either impure product or a lethal combination of alcohol or benzodiazepines and heroin. And why do heroin dealers cut their product, while pharmacies dispensing morphine don't? Because heroin is illegal.

A fourth reason that heroin is detrimental is that heroin addicts often have damaged kidneys. However, researchers aren't sure that this is a result of heroin use, or if it's a result of the adulterants that dealers use to increase their product's salable weight. Again, you can chalk this up to heroin's illegality.

And the fifth reason – and only reason that's not directly attributable to heroin's illegality – is that heroin causes chronic constipation. Yep, you heard it here first (probably) – heroin's only proven long-term health consequence, other than physical dependence, is constipation.

So, out of the four major consequences of heroin use, all of the really bad consequences are due not to the drug itself, but the environment that governments create when they ban the drug. The only real health consequence – constipation – is a minor irritation at best compared to the harm caused by the larger war on drugs.

World's largest pot bust

Actually, hash bust. And actually, it was the world's largest drug bust, by weight. The Guardian reports that Afghan police seized 260 tonnes of hashish worth $400 million. The article says that according to a an American general with the NATO, the hash belonged to the Taliban, and he goes on to gloat about how much this is going to hurt the Taliban. (Their profits, according to this NATO guy, would only have been $14 million, but it's unclear whether they'll have to cover the loss of the stash or not.) Of course, I'd be very surprised if even this enormous bust affected the prices of hash in Dutch coffeeshops and elsewhere in Europe, where it likely would have been sent.

As an interesting bit of narco-history, according to an uncited article from Cannabis Culture, poppy cultivation – the crude precursor to opium and heroin – was spurred during the '70s in Afghanistan because of American pressure on the Afghan government to crack down on cannabis cultivation. Since then, both the Taliban and its opposition have used the profits from drug cultivation to fund their operations. Ironically, today cannabis is replacing opium poppies for many farmers because of recent crackdowns on poppy cultivation.

Republican warmongers cause spike in oil prices, blame oil companies

Samuel R. Staley from the Reason Foundation has an editorial at the Hawaii Reporter about the irony of Republicans bemoaning high oil and gas prices and blaming the oil companies. An excerpt, recounting the reasons for the recent explosion of energy prices:

The third and most important factor, is what pundits are calling "geopolitical uncertainty."

We are at war in Iraq and still have troops in Afghanistan. Iran wants to rattle our bones by going nuclear and the world is wondering if we will militarily strike them to prevent it. Throw in an anti-Bush politician in charge of Venezuela (our fifth largest supplier of crude oil in February) and the political instability in Nigeria (our fourth largest supplier of crude oil in February) and at least one-fifth of the price of a barrel of oil on the world market is attributed to geopolitical uncertainty according to oil industry analysts.

I'd like to add something: with the exception of instability in Nigeria (of which I know little about), all of the major causes of the uptick in the price of oil have been egged on by the Russia government:

• Russia both supplied Iraq with most of its arms for the last three decades, while at the same time feeding the US intelligence (almost certainly erroneous, and likely intentionally erroneous) about Saddam's affinity for anti-American terrorism. Later, likely hoping to prolong the war and increase the period of instability before the oil started flowing again in Iraq, the Russians fed Saddam intelligence on America's military and war plan.
• Russia has been Iran's nuclear connection, despite the lack of obvious benefit to Russia. America's spat with Iran is the most recent development to raise the "geopolitical price premium" of oil.
• Russian arms were behind Venezuela's latest embarrassment over arming anti-Colombian rebels and the subsequent threat of US invasion and spike in the price of oil.
• Russia supports both the Armenians and the Azeris in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which has led to uncertainty regarding the West's access in the future to the Caspian Sea as an energy transshipment point.
• During the late Clinton years, Russia trained Ayman al-Zawahiri, who months later officially merged his terrorist organization with bin Laden's al-Qaeda and committed the 1999 US embassy bombings in East Africa, which Lawrence Wright thinks was an attempt to "to lure the United States into Afghanistan." The US responded with cruise missile strikes, and the attacks halted plans for an American-funded gas pipeline in Afghanistan, and ushered in the decade-long period lasting up until today of steadily rising oil prices.

In all of these cases, it wasn't the original sin that made the most impact, but rather then American response to it (or the markets' response to the events in light of recent American posturing). In acts of provocation, the provocateur commits an act that is seen as so egregious that it demands a response, yet the purpose of the attack is not to kill or even to terrorize, but rather to draw the victim into another conflict. When Russian support of anti-American dictators is seen as a tactic for drawing the US into conflict with oil-producing countries, the correct American response is not warmongering, as Putin's American critics would have, but rather a retreat from American imperialism abroad. Just something to think about.

Fraud at the Pentagon

Though the US military's budget has doubled since 2000 to more than $600 billion annually, the amount of auditors checking for fraud and abuse has stayed essentially flat, says Wired. Over $150 billion each year goes unaudited, and each auditor is responsible for reviewing the mind-bogglingly high amount of over $2 billion per year. From the article:

Crime – and even threats to national security – have also been allowed to flourish, thanks to the staffing shortages. Working with other agencies, the DOD IG's criminal investigators have brought in "770 criminal indictments, 644 convictions, and over $3.14 billion in criminal, civil, and administrative recoveries." But many other incidents are going unchecked. "Technology/Munitions theft and diversion crimes cannot be adequately investigated allowing these items to fall into the hands of those that would do the United States harm," according to the report.

"There have been massive holes in oversight for years, and in these shadows, criminals have been ripping off taxpayers and depriving our soldiers by wasting and stealing money and supplying defective equipment," Project on Government Oversight investigator Nick Schwellenbach tells Danger Room.

The DOD IG's office has certainly stayed busy. In just the last few months, the DOD IG caught a Philippine corporation bilking $100 million from the military health care system; nabbed a trio trying to bribe their way into drinking water contracts for troops; busted an Air Force general who tried to steer a $50 million deal to his buddies; and launched investigations into the Pentagon's propaganda projects and the youthful arms-dealer who sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of dud ammunition to the government.

What we all knew about terrorism, confirmed

The Washington Post published an entirely unsurprising article today, citing confidential government sources giving the details of data compiled by the US government on suicide bombings worldwide. Last year, there were 658 suicide attacks world wide, with 542 in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 21,350 have been killed in these attacks since 1983, and more than 80% of these have happened since 2001. The article says suicide bombings have occurred on five continents – the one without, I suppose, would be Oceania. According to the article, "[a]t least two-thirds of suicide bombings since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals." I take that to mean two-thirds of all attacks, not two-thirds of all victims of attacks. That number, I suspect, would be larger.

What disturbs me most about the article, though, is the fact that this had to be anonymously leaked and wasn't automatically made public. The article cites a military spokesman as saying that US casualties from suicide bombs in Iraq couldn't be revealed "because it might show the effectiveness of the enemy's weapon." In other words, we can't tell you, because you'd realize we're losing if we did.

Peer pressure

Since I don't know anyone who's ever been peer pressured into taking drugs, maybe DARE ought to target foreign ministries.