Afghanistan is more than the place where Osama bin Laden might be hiding. It's a place that originates  enormous amounts of dope, every year.
 
Most of that dope comes in the form of opium, papaver somniferum, the sleep producing flower, valued the world over for its somniferous properties, its superlative narcotic effect, and the ease with which it may be converted into cold hard cash.
 
Some people refer to Afghanistan as a failed narco-state, but those people are wrong.

Afghanistan may be thought of as a flourishing, enormously successful narco-state.  It is estimated to produce in excess of ninety percent of the world's supply of opium. That much opium is worth billions of dollars every year, even before its conversion to morphine, codeine and heroin.
 
Thefore, the war in Afghanistan may be thought of as either the Third or Fourth Opium War, depending on whether you count the French, British and American wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s AD.

 You may remember that the First and Second Opium Wars were conducted in the South China Sea, fought between the subjects of the soverign of Great Britain and the armies of the Qing Dynasty of China during the mid-1800s AD.

Through the prism of history, Opium Wars I and II are seen to have started because the Qing Dynasty wished to limit the trade of Chinese slaves and dope, and the operators of the British Empire violently disagreed.

The disagreement resulted in the capture and occupation of the island of Hong Kong by the British, and the capitulation to the opium and human trade by the Chinese. The occupation of Hong Kong continued well  into the 20th century, though the legal trade of opium there became a murkier proposition.

The war in Afghanistan did not begin as an opium war, but it may well end there. For all the Taliban's excesses, they succeded in limiting the production of opium during their time in government, by promoting terror in the local population.

In contrast, the production of opium has increased every year since Osama bin Laden allegedly engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center, promoted terror in the local population, and caused the latest invasion of Afghanistan.

A 2007 Ispos-Reid survey in Canada suggests that eight in ten Canadians were likely to support the legalization of the opium trade in Afghanistan. Canada's Armed Forces already support the opium trade in Afghanistan, by looking the other way while the poppies grow.

Canada, you might recall is a renouned producer of dope, chiefly marijuana, valued the world over for its superlative psychoactive properties and the ease with which it may be converted into cold hard cash.

Yet no one considers Canada to be a failed narco-state, except perhaps those who operate the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Canadian forces in Afghanistan want to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans, all of them whether they are insurgents or not. And the Taliban want to win the hearts and minds of the Canadian public, whether they support the Canadian Armed Forces activities there or not.

Since support for the opium trade is one of the few uniting elements of this violent drama, there may yet be light at the end of this tunnel of death that is the Afghanistan quagmire.

Several jurisdictions across the country are phasing out or withdrawing some guns from police service, in the wake of a recent report that some of the devices may be putting out more firepower than specified by their manufacturers.

Last week, CBC/Radio Canada aired a report on tests it comissioned on Glock handguns sold in Canada and used by police services across the country.

Those tests found that four of the weapons generated more kiling power than expected.

The Glocks, tested at an independent facility in the United States, varied within a 15 per cent range of the manufacturers specifications, the CBC reported.

Many people have died in Canada after being shot by the police. 

In a related development, the Quebec government announced this week it had ordered an audit of electrical stun guns in use by the province's police services, and directed that all Tasers manufactured before 2005 be tested to determine their electrical output.

Remember the three capitalized letters, WMD? They used to stand for the words Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nobody uses the term anymore, but those three letters were all over the news when the George Bush presidency was trying to capitalize on the fear of Americans still reeling from the September 11 attacks.

That fear gave the Bush regime a moral mandate to launch the second American war against Iraq in 2003, thus cementing modern disaster in Mesopotamia and setting the stage for a historic comeuppance against Republican ideals in America.

Even as early as 2005, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, the man tasked with characterizing the WMD threat for the world, was already admitting publicly that this period of his career stood as a blot on his record. Mr Powell's then admission marked a stunning retreat from the Bush regime's assertion that Iraq not only possessed weapons of mass destruction, but maintained a state of readiness to use them within a 45 minute timeframe. 

As it turned out, the invading American led forces found no WMD program in Iraq. In the recriminations that followed, it became clear that the evidence touted as the reason for invading Iraq had been entirely fabricated by elements of the US administration, up to and including the then Commander in Chief, George W Bush.

And so, some would say by the will of Allah, victory for freedom Iraq became the mother of all American military quagmires as thousands of well motivated insurgents made it their duty to send all the Americans home, one body bag at a time.

By September of 2008, the voting public in the United States had also decided that the reign of error in American politics had to come to an end. They pinned their hopes on the most unlikely seeming candate possible, a black man with a Muslim sounding name. The WMD debacle became the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
 
 Barak Hussein Obama's election can therefore be read as a repudiation of decades of mean spirited public policy in the United States. These policies have consistently punished the weak and increased suffering in the United States and abroad. The recent epoch in American life has seen the country reviled as a rogue nation, it's leadership openly ridiculed by even friendly governments, its people singled out for terroristic attack at every turn.

In this atmosphere, a black man has become America's golden child.

But this alone will not be enough to lead the United States out of its dark ages. There's already plenty of well publicized evidence to suggest that any informed observer should have been able to comfortably predict that Saddam Hussein's regime did not possess the means to attack far away countries with WMDs.

And the President of the United States is nothing if not an informed observer.

And so if there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then the people of Iraq are being made to suffer for some other reason. What could this other reason be?

The task of finding the answer to this question may well fall under many jurisdictions both within the United States and without. These include the FBI, US Congressional review, and the World Court.

The point of any legal post mortem of the Bush legacy would be to assure the world that America recognizes its uniqe place in the world. It  has become a nation so powerful that it cannot be sanctioned by other nations. And therefore its people and leaders must maintain strong institutions for policing themselves on the world stage.

Barak Obama's presidency must not squander the opportunity to reaffirm the values of the American Constitution. The leaders of all nations must be held accountable for the actions they initiate. America can be no different. And where those actions abridge freedom and cause egregious harm, then special care must be taken to ensure that the guilty are found out and punished.

It's the American way.

One day came the improbable news that some practically barefoot freedom fighters in a far away country had finally won a noble war against a vicious invading army, which had been routed.

Things seemed to get a little hazy after that, but soon there was more news and it was bad. The practically barefoot freedom fighters had split into two factions and they had started a new war, against each other. They battled using the discarded tanks and artilliary of their previously shared enemy, and neither side seemed to be able to win outright. 

Eventually a new third faction entered the fray. They were said to be students from some sort of Muslim school network in Pakistan, they were called Talib, and they seemed to have something against fun and laughter.

The significance of this didn't become clear until later, but meanwhile the struggle continued and the Talibs continued to make gains.

News of what was happening was scarce, but what news was available grew increasingly ominous. Nearly all civil liberties were being restricted in the Taliban pacified zones, and women were being singled out for special mistreatment. Shockingly, it seemed the country's complement of women had become prisoners in their own homes, restricted from moving about freely or otherwise living full lives, and no rescue seemed imminent.

The situation eventually fell out of the view of the Western media, and people who had heard of and cared about conditions in Afghanistan didn't have to wonder why, because the reason was obvious.

The obvious reason nobody tried to help the people of Afghanistan was that the barefoot freedom fighters had been a proxy army in Ronald Reagan's fight against the Soviet Union, and they had been given enormous amounts of cash by the CIA, and now they had reinvented themselves as a murderous public relations nightmare, and there was no profit in doing anything to change the situation.

Thus the situation was kept out of the public debate in the free world, and people who knew what was happening could only wait and hope and condemn the guilty in their minds.

But not everybody was content to simply sit back and condemn the guilty in their minds.

The non-Muslim world learned a new word, jihad, and this new word meant that enraged Muslims from all the corners of the world were going to Afghanistan to fight, not for the women, but for the Taliban, for Allah, for Islam.

Eventually the notorious Captain Pussy and I wrote a song about the thing, and we called it Starving in Afghanistan. Click on the play button to hear it.

The essential message of the song is that modern suffering is a media commodity, and thus the people doing the suffering are dehumanized for profit.

The names of the places where the victims suffer are interchangeable, the mechanisms that cause the suffering are interchangeable, and the reaction to the suffering varies widely but predictably.

If your country suffers and there is a profit motive for ending your suffering, then a big army will roll in and demolish whatever needs to be demolished, and kill whoever needs to be killed.

After that the media arrives and interviews the survivors and videotapes the destruction for posterity. Everyone else has to settle for just being unfortunate victims, and they get seconds of your time over dinner and the news.

Eventually a change did come to Afghanistan.

On September 9 2001, a Talib posing as a news cameraman detonated a bomb during an interview with one Ahmad Massoud. Massoud was the commander of something called the Northern Alliance, and as such he was the Taliban's main enemy and a Talib suicide bomber had martyred him, effectively wnning the civil war in Afghanistan for the Taliban.

But in the Taliban's greatest hour of triumph came their biggest blunder. The Talib had been sheltering a jihadi comrade named bin Laden, and two days after cementing their victory in Afghanistan, this comrade ensured their eventual demise by engineering the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Center.

After that the story advanced quickly. The plight of the Afghan people immediately became an American taxpayer concern, and boots were put on the ground and planes in the air and people were marked for death and seriously killed the survivors imprisoned in secret torture chambers.

But soon the Americans had to move on, and the Canadian military was duly roped in to do its part to secure freedom for the people of Afghanistan.

And that's where the still respected Canadian army still is to this day, battling the Taliban in a seemingly endless war that no side seems to be able to win outright.

Now comes the sad news that some of the Canadian military ranks think that those Canadians who drive their big SUVs and eat their fancy donuts and live their little lives don't care about what goes on in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is tainted by the hypocrisy of the American response there, and there in Iraq and elsewhere. And so some in the Canadian military fear that nobody knows what they're sacrificing their lives for, and that the plight of Afghan women and their children is something Canadians don't care about.

Let's hope that they're wrong.