As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.
The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new — and urgent — approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration’s deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a POLITICO investigation.
President Obama ordered two escalations in the "good" war, pushing our troop strength to 100,000 plus perhaps half that number from allies, only to walk away from trying to win.
What, I asked, was the point of the blood we shed? The president really couldn't bother to shut down a means the Taliban used to pay for their war and terrorism? Killing Osama bin Laden was the only thing Obama wanted out of the war, for his reelection campaign? Is that what the sacrifice was for?
But it isn't like we don't have a pattern here. President Obama also blocked prosecution of Hezbollah drug dealers--in pursuit of the gloriously awful Iran deal.
So just who was President Obama sucking up to with the Afghanistan decision and what awful deal did he hope to get with them?
And what is the excuse for Trump not reviving the effort?
