by Tom Klein

Created on: September 11, 2008

There are many challenges facing the United States at home and abroad, and thus devoting resources to very minor threats to the United States is wasteful and distracting at best, and at worst detrimental to thwarting greater challenges to the security of the United States. The United States is in Afghanistan for one purpose: to eliminate training grounds for terrorists and prevent their re-establishment. Those training sites in Afghanistan under the Taliban were where the 9/11 hijackers were trained. Drug eradication in a country with a thousand year history and culture of poppy cultivation is a distraction from the central military effort of eliminating terrorism and preventing its re-rooting in Afghanistan.

Ironically, one initiative undertaken by the Taliban during its hegemony in Afghanistran was to eradicate poppy cultivation because the drug trade was seen as a threat to Islamic law and rule. The Taliban were very successful at drug eradication because the penalty for drug cultivation or distribution was death. Severe penalties have a deterrent effect. Can poppy cultivation in remote valleys in Afghanistan be deterred in less severe, more Westernized, ways? Perhaps, but those methods are very expensive, and take resources from the main initiative of preventing terrorism from spreading beyond Afghanistan.

Bolivia presents no terrorist threat to the United States so drug eradication initiatives are standalone activities there, not ancillary to other military or political objectives, unlike in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in the scheme of the United States' international activities, should resources be devoted to coca plant eradication in Bolivia in an attempt to stem the tide of cocaine flowing to the United States? Again, coca eradication seems like a subsidiary goal compared to border security, eliminating terrorist threats, and even strengthening the military for its central activities in the world. Thus, from a resource allocation perspective, attempting to reduce the production of illicit drugs appears to divert scarce resources from more important objectives. Accordingly, the U.S. should play either no role or a very minor role in such eradication efforts.

Furthermore, if even a minor role is played by the United States in such efforts, goals should be carefully determined so progress can be measured. Even though plant eradication by acreage can be promoted as a goal - e.g. 4,000 acres of coca plants were cleared - it is difficult to assess if eradication efforts in one region lead to greater production in another region, particularly since the greater scarcity of the plant will cause it to command a higher price and thus create an incentive for greater production. The real supply destruction will only occur when the farmers in those regions have other competitive crops to produce. If measurable goals cannot be assessed and achieved, then indeed eradication efforts will prove to be only an expensive exercise and diversion from other, more worthy goals.

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