Reading this piece analyzing Karzai's apparently self-defeating -- indubitably, American-mission-threatening -- behavior reminded me of an interaction I once had with him.

The background to the story was a dispute between the Bush Administration, which was interested in pursuing aerial spraying to eradicate the poppy fields supplying the drug trade and the Karzai Administration, which claimed to support the goal of stopping the drug trade but just opposed the idea of aerial spraying.

My theory at the time was that Karzai actually opposed eradication and would have complained regardless of the method. At the time, this reminded me of a scene from a favorite childhood book of mine, Cheaper by the Dozen. In the book, as I remember it, the mother was objecting to the locus of the spanking applied by the father: "Not the seat of pants, dear.  Not there." But when he shifted to apply the spanking elsewhere, he got the same objection: "Not the top of the head, dear. Not there." Exasperated, the father bellowed, "Where can I spank him?"  The reply was classic, "I don't know where, but not there, dear. Not there."

Karzai claimed that was not the case, and when we pressed him for an explanation, he gave one that none of us had anticipated. He said we should do truck-based spraying, not aerial spraying, because that way the Afghan farmers would be able to shoot at the trucks in defense of their fields. As I recall, the conversation went something like this....

"Wouldn't that block the spraying?" 

"Not really. You could shoot back and the trucks would finish the job."

"But why not just do the aerial spraying and be done with it? It is safer and more efficient."

"Because the Afghan people will resent it so much more if they can't shoot back. They won't like losing the crops either way, but they will learn to live with it if they had a chance to shoot back while you were doing it. If you just do it from the air, they will feel powerless and the resentment will grow." 

It was not at all how we thought about the problem and perhaps it was not the real reason anyway. Perhaps Karzai calculated that the risks of ground-spraying would be enough for us to be deterred from proceeding.

But his explanation has always stuck with me, and it has a certain perverse logic to it. It certainly seems to me like Karzai is "taking pot-shots at the trucks," as it were. Maybe there is an Afghan logic to it.

Tonight a small but enterprising Miami-based TV network, SoiTV, will air a revealing interview with former Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice Eladio Aponte Aponte, who has been under the protection of the U.S. DEA for several days. The authors of this article had access to the interview results.

Judge Aponte Aponte is, so far, the highest official who has defected since Hugo Chávez came to power. His testimony presents a unique view into the criminal structure promoted by the current Venezuelan government. Aponte also names individuals who have committed serious violations of Venezuelan human rights and attacks on foreign interests.

Mr. Aponte confessed that he received direct orders from President Hugo Chávez to use his legal power against individuals that opposed the regime. As president of the criminal tribunal of the Supreme Court, Aponte had supervision of all criminal courts in the country and practically on all judges, with a capacity to influence almost any judicial decision.

Moreover, in his testimony Mr. Aponte says he also received calls from Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, Venezuela's Defense Minister and Hugo Carvajal, who until recently was the head of military intelligence, among others, ordering him to "manipulate judicial proceedings." Both Rangel Silva and Carvajal have been designated by the U.S. Treasury as "drug kingpins" for their ties to the narco-terrorist FARC guerrilla army in Colombia. Moreover, Aponte alleges that he has "evidence" of the high officials' ties to narcotics traffickers. An example he cites is that of a drug shipment that was safeguarded overnight in a Venezuelan military base. Aponte says he was ordered to provide legal cover for the drug shipment as it made its way from the border to "the center of the country" (on the coast, where Venezuela's ports are located).

Aponte also admits to having been linked to other important figures designated by the U.S. Department of Treasury as international drug traffickers, such as Walid Makled who, according to a federal indictment in New York, sent hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. with the help of top-ranking Venezuelan officials. Makled's "trial" began a few days ago in Venezuela.

It was, in fact, Aponte's link to Makled that led to Aponte's removal from the Supreme Court by the General Assembly of Venezuela and his subsequent defection to Costa Rica, where the DEA picked Aponte up. Makled had been arrested in Colombia nearly two years ago and extradited to Venezuela in 2011. While in a Colombian prison, Makled was interviewed by various U.S. law enforcement agencies, and his testimony implicated Aponte in drug trafficking. Since Chávez has had Makled in his jails for nearly a year, Chávez knew what Makled was going to say at his trial about Aponte, and therefore Aponte had to be "sacrificed" to save Chávez and what the Venezuelan people call his "narco-generals."

Numerous reports from the U.S. State Department and international human rights monitors indicate that the Venezuelan judicial system is used by the President Chávez as a tool to punish and persecute opposition leaders, as well as to obtain the release of drug traffickers.

Aponte's testimony is probably the most important evidence so far to show the lack of independent institutions in Venezuela, the existence of political prisoners, and the links between high-ranking members of the Venezuelan government to drug trafficking and criminal organizations such as Colombia's FARC.

Otto J. Reich is president of the consulting firm Otto Reich & Associates LLC. He is a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, and U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. Follow him on Twitter: @ottoreich

Ezequiel Vázquez Ger is an associate at Otto Reich Associates LLC and collaborates with the non-profit organization The Americas Forum. Follow him on Twitter: @ezequielvazquez

In the Al Pacino epic Scarface, about Miami's violent cocaine culture of the 1980s, the drug kingpin is seen as a Bolivian ensconced in a luxurious mountain villa with a handful of Bolivian generals in his pocket. It was of a piece with the times. (Bolivian dictator General Luis García Meza Tejada would later be sentenced to 30 years in jail for drug trafficking.)

However, through the 1990s and 2000s, successive Bolivian governments worked with the United States to cripple the drug cartels operating there, so much so that the notion of a South American narco-general seemingly had been dumped into the historical dustbin.

Well, thanks to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales, the South American narco-general appears to be rising again from the ash heap. Last week, a federal judge in Miami sentenced the former head of Bolivia's elite counternarcotics unit, General René Sanabria, to 14 years in prison for arranging protection for a shipment of some 140 kilos of cocaine from Bolivia to the United States. He was captured in June in Panama in a DEA sting and reportedly controlled a network of some 40 dirty cops.

Such is the outcome of Morales's decision in 2008 to expel the DEA from Bolivia, one of the largest cocaine producers in the world. Morales, a coca grower union leader, said the DEA's presence was an offense to the country's "dignity." Since then, the production and trafficking of cocaine has skyrocketed, with drug traffickers from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere seizing the opportunity to expand operations in Bolivia.

This month, the State Department again cited the Morales government as having "failed demonstrably" to adhere to their obligations under international agreements to combat narcotics trafficking.

Lumped in with Bolivia and Burma as countries that have also failed demonstrably is Venezuela, where Morales benefactor Hugo Chavez relies on his own share of narco-generals to maintain power. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department added another of Venezuela's most powerful generals, Cliver Alcalá, to its kingpin list, where he joins two others designated in 2008, the Commander-in-Chief of the Venezuelan military, General Henry Rangel Silva, and the Chief of Military Intelligence, General Hugo Carvajal. (The Treasury designation means any assets the individuals have in U.S. accounts are frozen and U.S. citizens are barred from doing business with them.)

All three are charged with aiding and abetting the activities of drug-running guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and all three were named by captured Venezuelan drug kingpin Walid Makled as having been on his payroll and facilitated his drug trafficking operations. (Unfortunately, the Obama administration failed to pursue Makled's extradition from Colombia, and he was sent back to Venezuela.)

U.S. law enforcement agencies -- particularly the DEA -- deserve great credit for following these investigatory leads wherever they have gone, considering the Obama administration's preference to avoid confrontations with Hugo Chavez and his regional acolytes. For a variety of important reasons the U.S. government needs to keep pushing for more designations and indictments, not the least of which is to send an unmistakable signal that this regional backsliding on the counternarcotics front is a growing concern.

For example, in Venezuela's case, Makled claimed he had videos and other documentary evidence implicating some 40 Venezuelan generals in his illicit activities. In Bolivia, opposition members believe the Sanabria case is only the "tip of the iceberg."

The Venezuela cases in particular deserve close attention, since narco-generals like Rangel Silva and Carvajal will work to spoil any democratic transition if Chavez's health should fail him, since their protected status could not be guaranteed in a post-Chavez Venezuela. They may be presently out of the reach of the U.S. law enforcement, but the continued "naming and shaming" of the narco-generals and, even better, their indictments by the U.S. government will make them less able to carry out their nefarious crimes.

President Barack Obama and his advisors formulated their Afghan policy almost exclusively to achieve one goal: deny safe haven to al Qaeda, according to Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars. Counterterrorism is an important goal, but the administration seems to believe it is the only goal. This is a seriously myopic vision of U.S. national security interests. We have a much broader range of interests at stake in Afghanistan and South Asia. The administration's failure to understand them goes a long way to explain why it settled on a half-hearted strategy in Afghanistan.

So why are we fighting?

• Deny safe haven permanently. If al Qaeda returns the day or the year after we leave, we lose. Our effort in Afghanistan has to be about more than an endless holding pattern or a temporary band-aid. It actually has to enable Afghans to continue denying safe haven after the last U.S. soldier has left. That is the main problem with the scaled-down counterterrorism-only plan: it presents no realistic scenario for the United States ever to leave.
• Prevent instability in Pakistan. Chaos in Afghanistan will bleed over into Pakistan. Woodward's book records only a few brief mentions of this danger by administration officials, yet state failure in Pakistan is probably a much greater long-term danger to U.S. security than al Qaeda regaining another safe haven.
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The murders of two employees of the U.S. consulate in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez serve as a grim, and likely unwanted, reminder to the Obama administration of the drug-fueled carnage taking place just across our southern border. With the range of foreign policy challenges on the President's plate, the last thing he probably wants to contemplate at this point is a deepening involvement in a messy entanglement involving ruthless drug cartels and a besieged government and society on our doorstep.

But foreign crises operate by no calendar, and, given the stakes involved, the Obama administration has no choice but to give higher priority to supporting Mexican President Felípe Calderón's declared war against the cartels in what will be a long, drawn out (and, in many quarters, controversial) struggle for the future of our neighbor and third-largest trading partner.

The administration deserves credit for following through on President Bush's commitment to President Calderón in Merida in 2007 to provide U.S. support for his effort to seize back his country from the grip of the drug mafias. Under the subsequently named Merida Initiative, the U.S. is providing more than $1 billion over three years in counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico, to include weapon-detection technology, surveillance and intelligence-gathering equipment, helicopters and training for police, prison, and military personnel. Look at that as a down-payment.

The effort in Mexico will involve a transformation no less dramatic than what Colombia has undergone over the past decade (and where the U.S. has invested some $7 billion in counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency assistance). From fundamental overhauls of the military and police, the judiciary and financial systems, and social and economic programs to head off the descent into the drug culture by the citizenry, the challenge Mexico faces is steep and costly.

And the United States is no innocent bystander. It is our society's insatiable demand for illicit narcotics that fuels the drug violence in Mexico. The demand for cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines is a plague visited not only on our own youth and social fabric but on Mexico's as well. As such, we have a responsibility and duty to not only combat the demand on the home front through prevention and rehabilitation programs, but also assist our neighbors combating the criminal elements profiting off such trade.

Just as Plan Colombia before it, the Merida Initiative has generated controversy: from the NGO industrial complex, that fears an empowered Mexican military and police will run roughshod over human rights; to those who oppose a military strategy in favor of attacking the social and economic roots of the drug culture or targeting the cartels' financial structures; and those who argue for decriminalization of drug use to end the carnage. (Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda, concluding the drug war is lost after only three years, recently made that case elsewhere on this site.)

Yet aside from the latter, there is no reason why all of that cannot be incorporated into a comprehensive strategy, much as we have done in our partnership with Colombia. Certainly the drug war in Mexico will not be won without fundamental reforms of the judiciary, rooting out corruption, addressing broader societal ills, and employing sophisticated financial strategies to choke off the cartels' profits. But neither will those initiatives have any chance of succeeding without robust military and police pressures on the cartels that include arresting kingpins, breaking up networks, and interdicting drug shipments: anything and everything that drives up the cost of doing their nefarious business.
The Obama administration can signal its continuing support and commitment to President Calderon's brave and unprecedented campaign to save his country from further damage by the drug mafias by formally committing to a follow-on phase to Merida, a Merida Initiative II, just as was done in Colombia. This would key of the progress made to date and expand, in partnership with the Mexican government, the "softer" side reforms so desperately needed to strengthen the judiciary and civil society -- while continuing the "hard" side of taking the war to the cartels.
With some 90 percent of the cocaine and much of the marijuana crossing our borders from Mexico, our security and societal well-being is directly affected by what is happening there. President Calderón has embarked on a campaign that none of his predecessors has dared, despite years of U.S. pleadings; that is, rescue his country from the violence and lawlessness of the drug trade and welcome U.S. partnership in doing so. The country has already paid a high price, with up to a reported 18,000 deaths in the past three years (albeit many of those caused by internecine gang warfare over turf).
The Obama administration has acknowledged a "shared responsibility" to combat the drug trade. Today, more than ever, that sentiment needs to be backed by strong action in support of a friend of the U.S. trying to do the right thing.