Posted on 01/18/2004 11:29:38 AM PST by areafiftyone
Drugs now are the principal source of funding for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said.
Afghanistan's record opium poppy crop, from which most of Europe's heroin supply is derived, is fueling a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda, she said.
This situation, said the French minister, requires a "more muscular approach to eradication and to the surveillance of banking networks." The exchange of intelligence in real time is working "extremely well," she explained, "but it must be constantly reinforced."
Afghan drug production now is estimated to be contributing between $1 billion and $2 billion to warlords and drug lords. This is why Afghan warlords wish to keep their distance from Kabul's central authority, Alliot-Marie said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"These vast amounts of drug money have the potential for funding the acquisition by terrorists of CBRN weapons -- chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear," she said. "The international weapons black market is also fueling terrorism and political upheavals in different parts of the world."
Western countries "must also fight against all the frustrations that are the source of terrorism -- despair, poverty and injustice -- that also lead to the recruitment of terrorists in universities who rebel against the injustices they perceive," she said.
Alliot-Marie said terrorists around the world were using the situation in U.S.-occupied Iraq and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian dispute to gain supporters.
As much as France and other European countries want Iraq's transition to democratic stability to succeed, she said, the sine qua non for success is "a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," which is the Middle East's "principal source of instability."
Instability in Iraq and the festering Israeli-Palestinian crisis are being used as "a pretext by terrorists, both locally and globally," which is another reason "to move very fast on changing the environment that creates more terrorism," she said.
As for the long-running differences between the French government and the Bush administration, the French minister said they had been exaggerated but also "exacerbated today by certain radical neoconservative ideas, the very antithesis of European sensibilities."
She strongly denied France is trying to turn Europe into a counterweight to the United States in the world, "but certain differences and substantive changes are undeniable."
She listed them as:
Muscular?
The only exercise the French get is doing jumping jacks while holding white flags, wearing jerseys with yellow stipes down the back.
"Different historical and geographical experiences. These may lead the Europeans to search instinctively for dialogue and compromise."
Translation from French to English: "We're used to getting our as*es kicked, so we're kinda hand shy. Can't we all just get along?"
By waging the War On (Some) Drugs, we only keep their price up and their sellers profiting. The way to defund al-Qaeda and other terrorist drug-sellers is to relegalize them.
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