DOLLARS FOR THE TALIBAN

The U.S. government was funding the Taliban as little as four months ago.
In May of this year, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the
presentation of $43 million in cash and other aid to the Taliban. In theory
this funding was to be used to help dirt-poor subsistence farmers to stop
growing poppies for the heroin market.

Never mind that this was the most rabid anti-American group we had ever
dealt with. Never mind that we were well aware that the Taliban was
offering shelter to a range of terrorists. Never mind that this was money
granted to a government that we do not even recognize. Never mind all of
our basic beliefs about human rights, women's rights and liberty, this was
the war on drugs.

I support the president in what he now must do, but in time, we must all
ask ourselves how we will hold him accountable for what he did. Follow the
money, indeed.

- --James A. Lloyd, Sacramento

What do the U.S. government and the Taliban have in common? Unbridled
fanaticism.

When the U.S. government gave $43 million to the Taliban in exchange for
the Taliban declaring opium poppy farms to be "against the will of God,"
the U.S. sought to fuel its own fanatical obsession, the "war on drugs."

Despite U.S. knowledge that the Taliban was an oppressive "rogue" regime,
the U.S. government ignored the Taliban's systematized cruelties in order
to push its own domestic and dogmatic antidrug agenda.

By militarizing the Taliban to punish Afghan farmers growing opium poppies
- -- farmers desperate for a cash crop to feed their families in a country of
decimated agricultural infrastructure -- the U.S. government may have
indirectly subsidized terrorism. Just one more example of the drug war's harm.

- --Wrye Sententia, Davis