Target Centermass

Day: January 25, 2005

  • Reciprocity IX

    Just wanted to thank two fine blogs for adding Target Centermass to their blogrolls:

    Argghhh!!! — I’m honored.
    The Fire Ant Gazette — Love the many moods of Abbye.

    Also, to update a recent Reciprocity, John at TexasBestGrok has moved Target Centermass from his “The Green Hills of Earth” category to his “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” listing. Unfortunately, I haven’t read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [hanging head in shame], so I don’t know how to interpret this. Rather than pester John, however, I have instead resolved to read it next and harass then, if necessary. FYI, John has a new SFBabe Poll up, so go vote on the hottest Dr. Who companions.

    As always, if you’ve linked or blogrolled Target Centermass and I haven’t found you, please send an email or post a comment. No good deed should go unrewarded.

  • Is Afghan Poppy Crackdown Working?

    It looks for now like it is, as the President Hamid Karzai’s hardline stance against the drug crop may be having a significant effect.

    The top U.N. drug official is heading to Afghanistan to check out reports that farmers are heeding government calls for a “holy war” on the rampant drug trade by slashing opium cultivation.

    Foreign and Afghan officials are forecasting a drop of between 30 percent and 70 percent in this year’s crop, as once verdant expanses of poppies are being sown with wheat instead.

    In eastern Nangarhar province and southern Helmand, poppy production could be down by more than three-quarters this year, the officials said, though reliable statistics are not yet available.

    The reports suggest at least an initial response to President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-sponsored campaign against the illegal Afghan narcotics industry, which last year supplied an estimated 87 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material for heroin.

    […]

    Skeptics say drought, disease and falling opium prices — not Karzai’s eradication program — are responsible for the drop in cultivation.

    […]

    The United Nations said that although bad weather and plant disease significantly reduced the opium yield last year, the total output was about 4,200 tons. It valued the trade at $2.8 billion, or more than 60 percent of the country’s 2003 gross domestic product, and warned that Afghanistan was turning into a “narco-state.”

    Under pressure from the United States and Europe, Karzai has called for “jihad,” or holy war, against the drug industry, which is believed to benefit guerrillas, warlords and corrupt officials.

    Foreign diplomats give some of the credit to Mohammed Daoud, a former militia commander and the government’s top anti-narcotics cop. Daoud, a deputy interior minister, summoned provincial police chiefs to Kabul and told them they would be fired if they didn’t halt poppy cultivation.

    Daoud said in an interview he expected cultivation to fall by 50 percent to 70 percent this year.

    A Western official involved in counternarcotics was more cautious, saying the decrease could be 30 percent or more.

    Even worst case, this is a vast improvement. So what’s the pocketbook hit for Uncle Sam right now?

    The U.S. government is paying thousands of people in Helmand and Nangarhar $3 a day to clean irrigation ditches and repair roads instead of planting poppy.

    Really, just a pittance. Is it worth it, along with the continued military efforts for stability?

    Farmers in two traditional growing areas of Nangarhar told an AP reporter they stopped planting poppies because they were told to by powerful local landowners and security officials.

    “It was good business, but they said we should stop, and wait and see,” said Abdul Wahid, a bearded sharecropper resting under a stand of mulberry trees next to his fields.

    “If we get help, maybe it’s gone for good. If not, we’ll plant again.”

    Yes. Yes. Yes.

  • Democracy a Chance to Divide Iraq’s Insurgency

    Holy crap, it appears the USA Today pretty much agrees with my interpretation of the latest alleged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tape — that it is a statement of fear of democracy. To go one further, they spell out their idea of a way to use democracy as a wedge between foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi and the Iraqis working with them.

    A week before Sunday’s scheduled elections, perhaps inadvertently, al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi revealed one weakness the United States can exploit. A taped audio message attributed to Zarqawi declared a “fierce war” on “this evil principle of democracy,” threatening everyone associated with the elections, from voters to poll workers to candidates.

    A group of Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq soon provided an equally revealing response. They said they would get involved in politics and in shaping a future constitution — despite encouraging Sunnis to boycott the elections.

    The Sunni leaders aren’t, of course, insurgents. But they helped expose a divide between foreign and Iraqi insurgents. Zarqawi and Iraq’s Sunni insurgents have joined forces to fight a common enemy: the U.S. occupiers. Over the long term, however, they have very different goals.

    Zarqawi has natural appeal to bin Laden fundamentalists who want to bring Taliban-style rule to the Middle East. The idea of democracy — man’s law against Allah’s — has long been an abomination to them.

    But that path is not one that would appeal to most Sunnis in Iraq. In polls last year, most favored some kind of representative government, with just an Islamic flavor.

    That distinction is useful in finding ways to fight the insurgency. Most Iraqi Sunnis, as the politicians’ statements showed, are mainly worried about losing the political clout they enjoyed for decades under fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein and his predecessors, despite making up less than 20% of Iraq’s population.

    But enough to opt for the kind of Dark Ages followers of Osama bin Laden aspire to? Not likely, given the kind of middle-class secular lives most have lived.

    No insurgency — Maoist guerrillas, Algerians fighting French rule or Vietnamese trying to rout Americans — can parlay military inferiority into advantage without maintaining support among local populations.

    Go give it a read.

  • Attention, Lone Star Bloggers 2

    There’s a new group blog started for Texas bloggers named, surprisingly enough, Texas Bloggers. From the founder, Bunker at Bunker Mulligan:

    This site will become, I hope, a forum for all bloggers in Texas. It is blog-oriented. It is not a political site. I would like to see it become somewhere for bloggers from around the State to offer advice and assistance to others, and as a way to publicize Texas bloggers and the things they are doing in regard to media, traditional and digital.

    Feel free to drop by and say hello to the Lone Star State.