Why am I such a party pooper? Trust me, I desperately want to be like those happy-go-lucky folks in the red states who apparently think things are hurtling along just fine. Unfortunately, the facts keep bridling my optimism.
Take the United States' alleged great achievements in Afghanistan. Remember during the campaign how President Bush repeatedly celebrated the divinely inspired success of his administration toward turning Afghanistan into a stable democracy? "In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty," he said in the third presidential debate. "And I can't tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march." As compared with Iraq, which Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" has aptly titled "Mess-O-Potamia," Afghanistan has claimed fewer American lives and taxpayer dollars, while managing to hold a presidential election since U.S. and warlord irregulars deposed the brutal Taliban regime three years ago.
Sure, we haven't captured Osama bin Laden or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, and 20,000 young American soldiers are rather miserably stationed there, but who am I to nitpick when faced with the stirring sight of democracy abloom?
Well, truth is, freedom in Afghanistan continues to be on more of a stoned-out stumble than a brisk march. The Taliban has been driven from Kabul, but it still exists in the countryside, and the bulk of the country is still run, de facto, by competing warlords dependent on the opium trade -- which now accounts for 60% of the Afghan economy.
"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality," said the executive director of the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa. "Opium cultivation, which has spread like wildfire ... could ultimately incinerate everything: democracy, reconstruction and stability."
Costa's office has just released a slew of discouraging numbers that lay out in numbing detail how Afghanistan's opium production has soared in the last year to an all-time high. The raw form of heroin is now the staple crop in every province, while in just one year the area under poppy cultivation has increased 64%. The country produces 87% of the world's opium, and one out of 10 Afghans is employed by the illicit industry, according to the alarming U.N. report.
