{"id":195187,"date":"2008-07-24T17:37:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T22:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/24\/drug-warrior-call-for-war-on-drugs-in-afghanstan-damn-the-consequences\/"},"modified":"2008-07-24T17:37:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T22:37:00","slug":"drug-warrior-call-for-war-on-drugs-in-afghanstan-damn-the-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/24\/drug-warrior-call-for-war-on-drugs-in-afghanstan-damn-the-consequences\/","title":{"rendered":"Drug Warrior Call For War On Drugs in Afghanstan, Damn the Consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Schweich, the former enior counternarcotics official in the United States Embassy in Kabul, is claiming that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/07\/24\/world\/asia\/24afghan.html?scp=1&amp;sq=Thomas%20Schweich&amp;st=cse\">the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt and that Afghanistan is nearly a narco-state<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The allegations as reported are alarming, but when you read <a href=\"http:\/\/iht.com\/articles\/2008\/07\/24\/news\/27afghant.php\">his essay on the his experiences there<\/a>, it becomes far less concerning.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s clear that this guy is a hard core drug warrior.  He opposes payments in lieu of growing poppies, supports aerial spraying of defoliants, military operations for poppy eradication, etc.<\/p>\n<p>This is precisely the sort of crap that pushes peasants to the Taliban, but he sees everything through the lens of &#8220;drugs bad&#8221;, and ignores secondary effects, so he&#8217;s now writing a tell-all.<\/p>\n<p>It is this myopic view that created the disaster of prohibition, and is fostering the disastrous &#8216;war on drugs&#8221; now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Schweich, the former enior counternarcotics official in the United States Embassy in Kabul, is claiming that the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt and that Afghanistan is nearly a narco-state. The allegations as reported are alarming, but when you read his essay on the his experiences there, it becomes far less concerning. It&#8217;s clear that &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1013,964],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-drugs","category-foreign-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}