Buy into a fresh drugs policy
Robert Leeson; 15/4/08; Visiting professor of economics at Stanford University and adjunct professor at Murdoch and Notre Dame Australia universities.
What is the framework that informs Kevin Rudd’s view of the world? Our Prime Minister has made his debut on the world stage, embracing some old and stale rhetoric about drugs. Rudd wishes to eradicate the Afghan poppy crop and thus (he hopes) undercut the flow of funds to our enemies. This was a challenge staring us in the face when he visited Afghanistan in 2004 but it hasn’t got better since then. We must, he asserts, begin to achieve a resolution of how this is to be done. The war in Afghanistan since October 2001 has been tortuous and inconclusive: 78 months compared with two completed world wars (51 and 71 months, respectively). By the end of 2010, the agents of Operation Enduring Freedom will have endured the illogicality of their endeavours longer than the defeated Soviet occupiers (December 1979 to February 1989). Rudd states that his commitment to maintaining our 1000 troops is rock solid. As he told the ABC, “As I’ve said to President Bush in Washington, it’s for the long haul.” However, the war on the Taliban and its opium crop is no common or garden war: instead, it resembles the equilibrium of the four-decade-long Cold War.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23539449-7583,00.html
Tags: Afghanistan; USA, Australia, Drugs, Terrorism