My hunch was correct: Wood was moved to Kabul because he is supposedly skilled in running a counter-narcotics campaign. Now General Pace has chimed in, saying Colombia should serve as a model for how to proceed in Afghanistan. He’s absolutely right, if they want an entrenched, semi-permanent insurgency occupying vast swaths of the countryside, with deep ties to international smuggling rings; a weakened, fearful central government that regularly allows its officials to be murdered; and a timid, impoverished, abused population just hoping the fighting will eventually stop so they can get on with their lives.
If anything, Colombia should show that eradication and interdiction don’t work. Turkey and India, on the other hand, indicate that coopting production into legal markets, like pain killers, does.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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