Power vs. poppies (an early gift from Jim Hoagland)

Jim Hoagland just became my favorite columnist.

Poppies vs. Power in Afghanistan

This is the most dead-on analysis of the problems of American power, as well as its relationship to the drug war, that I think I have ever seen from a mainstream columnist.

Jim is figuring it out. And his analysis is brilliant.

And he is right. Highlights from this brilliant article that must be read in totality:

"The power to destroy does not carry within it the power to control. A century of failed colonial rule and the American misadventure in Vietnam etched that lesson on global consciousness for a time. It has taken the huge problems that affluent, nuclear-armed nations are encountering in the miserable ruins of Afghanistan and Iraq to drive it home anew.

Call it the paradox of overwhelming but insufficient force. It is surfacing in a struggle in Afghanistan over the wisdom of chemically eradicating that nation's expanding poppy fields. They are the source of (1) the livelihoods of many Afghan peasants, (2) a record flood of heroin into Western markets and (3) funding for the Taliban and other terrorist forces.

William Wood, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, has pushed so aggressively for aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields that he has been nicknamed "Chemical Bill" by NATO officers serving there. President Bush posted Wood to Afghanistan after he oversaw a large eradication-by-air project in Colombia, with mixed results.

Wood's priorities have divided U.S. and Afghan policymakers. President Hamid Karzai's government fears both environmental damage and the radicalizing political effect that a spraying program might have on the peasants Karzai is trying to coax away from the Taliban. For the moment, Karzai has gained the upper hand over the State Department's narcotics bureau in this ongoing fight...

...Spraying in Colombia did not diminish the flow of drugs from that South American country. Gates and other U.S. officials credit President Alvaro Uribe (and Wood's support for him) with "uprooting corruption in government" and keeping it from tipping into the narco-state category. Only in that sense could Colombia be a model for Afghanistan.

The West will begin to resolve the grim and massive problems that the international drug trade creates only when the United States and Europe make justice rather than vengeance the center of drug laws, create effective rehabilitation programs that fill hospitals rather than jails and curb the demand for life- and soul-destroying narcotics at home. Even a "successful" poppy eradication program in Afghanistan would be no more than a bandage on a gaping wound, while inflicting great damage on Karzai's government.

Afghanistan has been treated as a one-dimensional device in the current U.S. presidential political season. Democrats use it to establish that they are not pacifists, citing Afghanistan as a just war that they endorse in contrast to Bush's invasion of Iraq, which they deplore, and move on quickly. Republicans are little better on the stump.

But Afghanistan is an urgent, rapidly evolving crisis that demands the attention and commitment of all candidates for national office. So do America's overly harsh and counterproductive drug laws.

And so does the paucity of support for providing tax dollars for prevention and rehabilitation rather than incarceration of simple users. The American nation could give itself no better present in this season than a thorough rethinking of its war on drugs and of many aspects of its war on terror."

You really have to read the whole thing. But it's a sign of the trend at the Post, at least among independents and conservatives at that paper, along with more free trade commitments of liberals at the Post, of a more liberally-committed and rational period in Washington policy-making, I hope.

Thank you, Jim. You just made my Christmas. Merry Christmas, Jim. Happy New Year to us all.