When you lack a strategy, but want to pretend things aren’t going south, there’s really only one man to call: Richard Holbrooke.
We’re approaching year 15 of NATO forces in Bosnia, the result of Holbrooke’s last Special Envoy “breakthrough”.
Meanwhile, in Dayton, Ohio, where Holbrooke once gave peace a chance, the unemployment rate’s gone from 3.4 to 11.5%.
I’m certain the locals wouldn’t mind having a few moderate Talibaners, a sharp-dressed man like Hamad Karzai, and the Pakistani intelligence services in town to stimulate the local economy.
Anyhow, firm and resolute, an envoy’s envoy, Holbrooke opines: We need a new task force on Taliban drug money!
And here I thought we had this already, a little thing called The US Treasury Office of Terrorism And Financial Intelligence.
Now granted, this agency’s been doing a bang-up job in places like Mexico and Colombia, you can hear the bangs outside your window most every night down there, but that’s only because we’re financing both sides of the war on drugs.
In Afghanistan it’s vastly different, there are way more than two sides and NATO’s doing its level best to finance each and every one.
Diplomatically, Gorilla is stumped: “We could make Afghan drug lords work for Big Pharma, in the same way Mexican and Colombian drug lords work for American gun dealers, but then how would we fill Holbrooke’s valuable time?”.
