CUTTING DRUG SUPPLY MIGHT CUT THE TERROR

If we were making progress, if we were winning the war, then I'd be
standing up for every move Canada makes in Afghanistan.

But we're not, and every day the death toll grows higher, and the
frequency of suicide bombings and landmine explosions keeps on increasing.

Now to be very clear, I support our troops, respect their efforts and
mourn their deaths. What I think is the problem is that from our side
we are waging a battle by the rules, when the other side knows of none.

But even that is not the issue.

What we have is a war that will never end because we are not
attacking the reason for it. What is happening today in that forlorn
country is not about oppression or religious freedom or moving a
people from mud huts to mansions.

It is all about the supply of drugs.

Afghanistan produces something like 90 per cent of the world's opium
. . . and that translates into a $55 billion-a-year heroin industry
in North America.

Where do you think the money comes from to buy all those RPGs and
bombs and guns and stuff that are killing our soldiers, and the dope
that kills hundreds more every day on the streets of North America?

To end the carnage in Kandahar and every other mudhut village in that
region, we have to cut off the money supply, destroy the drug
production industry.

I think a few stealth bombers loaded with Roundup instead of bombs
would be more effective. Defoliate those poppy fields, and keep doing
it until they stop growing the stuff anymore.

We may never change the way the people of the Middle East regard our
western way of life, but perhaps we can change our own way of life by
cutting the drug flow, and reducing the number of people who die from
drugs, from drug-related crime, protect the young and innocent from a
life of degradation, addiction and prostitution.

It sounds simplistic, but it's hard to fight a war without money, and
from what I can gather the main cash source in Afghanistan is from
drugs, and that is what the warlords are out there protecting.

Why else is there fighting in the streets? It's not like we are
trying to change their way of life, or really even make them believe
something we believe.

Yes, we went there to try to prevent the growth of terrorism and end
the oppressive regime of the Taliban. But now it seems it's all about
the warlords, whose revenue sources have spiked since they now
control the fractured country.

The human tragedy that drugs create far eclipses what is happening in
Afghanistan.

It may sound simplistic, but if we switch focus from a war on terror
to a war on drugs we might eventually slow it down, and possibly win it.

Right now we have nothing else to lose but more lives wasted in a
cause that won't go away unless we attack the root of it.

The poppies that wave in Afghanistan are not benign as those were in
Flanders Fields.