Financing Afghanistan

According to yesterday's New York Times, President Obama is about to approve a plan that would double the number of Afghan security forces - to three times the number projected in 2002. According to the report, "even members of Mr. Obama's security team appeared taken back by the cost of the program."

The program, the Times reports, will cost up to $20 billion over seven years. Already the government in Kabul depends on the international community's largesse and the new costs are more than twice the budget of the entire government.

Nevertheless, this is a cost that it appears we will have to pay if we are interested in winning this fight. NATO, as a recent Times editorial put it, is "frighteningly close to failing" in Afghanistan.

And it is not because of the usual suspects - the terrorism, corruption and weak central government, to paraphrase the Times - that the alliance is confronting in Afghanistan. NATO is being undone by its own fecklessness. Members are compelled to come to the defense of any fellow state who is attacked - such as the U.S. was on 9/11 - but they can do so in whatever way they deem acceptable.

Germany, for example, refuses to allow its soldiers to engage in combat missions. Other nations won't eradicate opium though they acknowledge that it is now the Taliban's main revenue stream. The only states of the 26 members who have proved themselves to be mostly reliable when it comes to heavy lifting are the US, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
And no surprise to find out that many of the same NATO members that are loathe to bloody their hands are just as loathe to foot a larger bill. This, they are suggesting, is where the oil rich monarchies should come in.

While they should indeed -Al Qaeda and the Taliban love the Persian Gulf countries no more than they love the Western democracies, given all the demands about reducing carbon consumption - the source of their wealth, one wonders how eager they will be to help. Hoist yourself on your own methane gas, one can imagine them saying when Europe comes begging for Afghan alms.

Perhaps a better idea would be to let Afghanistan fund the cost. They could easily do this if they would only legalize the opium industry. Think of all the goals we could accomplish with this one step.

We could cut off the Taliban's funds, disenfranchise the criminal class, put profits in the hands of law-abiding and pro-democracy Afghans, create a tax base for the government and take Afghanistan off the international dole.

Pretending for a moment that we could even fund this new program, why lose both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror?