Afghanistan: Karzai’s Brother Linked to Heroin Trade?

This report is a little stale , but this report came out yesterday .

I’ll get to the connection in a sec.  You can probably guess where it’s going to go.

But first, allow me to rant about the cost of the Afghan mission.  Why is that Conservatives are so inept when it comes to managing budgets.  They pretend they are fiscally responsible.  They are the only party that Canadians should trust with their tax dollars.  They say they are the ones to manage financial situations, but they have no clue about where the money is being spent and they have no idea what the final numbers will be.

Within 12 months of being in office, they took a $12 billion surplus and gave it away to corporations.

Where’s the accountability?  For Afghanistan, $18 billion is a guess at this point.  Here’s my guess:  it’ll be a hell of a lot more.

But even if it’s $18 billion, that’s about $600 for every single Canadian, give or take.  It may not sound like a lot, but it’s $600 (per person) we should have been spending on (a) peacekeeping instead of war making, (b) Canada or (c) people who really want to create change in their countries (feel free to provide a list in the comments).

Which gets me to my second point:  I don’t believe that the people who are ruling Afghanistan are committed to using NATO forces for anything other than protecting their drug trade.  I know:  this is a bold statement and it’s an emotional one, but it’s hard to feel otherwise.  The president’s brother has been labelled as having a connection with heroin traders in that country and it’s hard to imagine how such a close connection could not resonate throughout the entire family.

I could be wrong.  I’d like to be wrong.  Like the Bin Laden family had one big black sheep.  Right?

Anyways, it seems reprehensible to me that we can’t track what’s being spent and when we’re spending it, we might be indirectly fostering one of the world’s largest suppliers of heroin.  To think that this is what nearly 100 young Canadians gave their lives for makes me sick.