The Bolter: Specter Spectacle Hides Deadly New Folly in Terror War

“We often come across a compound that has opium and I.E.D. materials side by side, and opium and explosive materials and weapons,” General Nicholson said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “It’s very common — more common than not.”

All you have to do is say "Taliban," and any attack (and any death) in the opium regions will be justified. Of course, if really pushed, you can always find some handy "I.E.D materials" lying around: nails, maybe, or pipe, or shovels -- the kind of thing that some American troops in Iraq carried with them on patrol to plant on anyone they killed along the way.

Thus once again, as I've noted many times before (going back to December 2001), the "War on Terror" morphs into the "War on Drugs" -- both of them gigantic engines of corruption, destruction, death and draconian power. The latest offensive will find American forces allying with one local group of gangsters or another, who will use the money and weapons of the big foreign kahuna to muscle out their enemies (in other words, a replica in miniature of the Afghan conflict as a whole).

Of course, the decriminalization of drugs would immediately gut the vast, over-inflated profits of the international drug racket, and bring the trade in these commodities down to a more natural, controllable (and taxable) level. It would not stop the common human propensity to use -- and yes, abuse -- mood-altering substances, but this would then be a public health (and private psychological) problem, not a massive, never-ending military war, waged largely against the poor -- and against the civil liberties of us all.

III.
But the folly of Obama's New Opium War does not end there. Buried in the NY Times story is this little strategic note:

Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.

In other words, the United States is about to deploy thousands of mobile troops -- backed to the hilt with heavy artillery and airpower -- along a vast stretch of the Pakistan border, where, as the New York Times tells us, they will be involved in "months of heavy fighting" against an enemy that Obama and the Pentagon continually tell us is directed, supplied and succored from...Pakistan.

How long will it take this heavy fighting to spill across that invisible border, which already being penetrated on a regular basis by U.S. drone missile attacks? If you think the Pakistan Taliban is aroused now (although of course the "existential danger" they pose has been exaggerated, deliberately, by the Administration), what will happen when American troops move in deadly force across the border -- in "hot pursuit" of Taliban forces, or perhaps to wipe out Taliban bases?

But of course, this seems to be the ultimate aim of our Terror Warriors: the expansion of the war into Pakistan. Indeed, they have long been talking openly of the "Af-Pak front," yoking both countries into one theater of war. Yet every deadly strike in Pakistan, every bit of meddling in that sovereign nation's internal affairs only radicalizes more and more Pakistanis, heaps more hatred on the United States, engenders more resistance to American policies, destabilizes what is overwhelmingly a peaceful and non-violent society in Pakistan -- and absolutely guarantees the continuation of murderous conflict on every side.

Yes, the Specter spectacle is good fun for all the savvy chatterers flitting around the imperial Potomac throne -- but back in the real world, where operations of real power take place, the tides of blood and suffering keep rising.