Like the Left, the Right — including the libertarian right — sometimes puts its desire to make ideological points above even minimal fact checking. Such is the case with a recent Cato Institute article by Ted Galen Carpenter which does little more than rewrite a long-debunked column by Robert Scheer.
Carpenter’s column, How Washington Funded the Taliban is largely a rewrite of a column originally written by Leftist Robert Scheer and published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2001. Scheer claimed that the Bush administration decided to reward the Taliban with a $43 million grant after the Taliban cracked down on opium production. This claim is nonsense, but apparently Carpenter was so taken by the chance to make a point against the drug war that he ditched all his critical thinking skills out the window.
Lets look at some of the lowlights of Carpenter’s article,
When the Taliban implemented a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001, U.S. officials were most complimentary. James P. Callahan, director of Asian Affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, uncritically relayed the alleged accounts of Afghan farmers that “the Taliban used a system of consensus-building” to develop and carry out the edict. That characterization was more than a little suspect because the Taliban was not known for pursuing consensus in other aspects of its rule. Columnist Robert Scheer was justifiably scathing in his criticism of the U.S. response. “That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising,” Sheer noted, but he considered it “grotesque” for a U.S. official to describe the drug-crop crackdown in such benign terms.
Yes, Callahan was impressed by the almost immediate cessation, but this is selective quoting. Callahan made it clear that the poppy ban succeeded partially due to the fervor of extremist Islamic ideals and partially due to the threat of prison for people who violated the ban. But in Carpenter and Scheer’s worlds it is a lot easier to use selective quotes.
Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban’s proclaimed ban of opium cultivation. In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. Given Callahan’s comment, there was little doubt that the new stipend was a reward for Kabul’s anti-drug efforts. That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan’s estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan’s theocratic masters.
This is simply factually erroneous. The $43 million grant was, in fact, humanitarian aid. At the time, Afghanistan was yet again experiencing drought and hunger. Beginning in the late 1990s, the United States was the primary donor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan related-relief, and the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, authorized relief aid that the World Food Program requested.
Moreover, despite the impression given by Carpenter, the $43 million didn’t go directly to the Taliban nor was it in the form of cash. In reality, the United States authorized the shipment of $43 million in food and other supplies to United Nations famine relief efforts that were based in Pakistan at the time. In fact, at the time Colin Powell was explicit in saying that the relief aid would “bypass the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it.”
(I suppose that Carpenter thinks the United Nations and World Food Program just trumped up their estimates of hundreds of thousands of famine deaths in the Spring of 2001 in order to provide cover for the Bush administration to reward the Taliban with surplus corn).