1NC DA
GOP likely to gain control of the Senate because low Democratic turnout
Sargent, 8/19 (Greg, 8/19/2014, Morning Plum: Obamacare disappearing as major issue,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/08/19/morning-plum-obamacaredisappearing-as-major-issue/, JMP)
But wait — does this mean Democrats will necessarily hold the Senate? No, it doesn’t. Dems could very
well lose the Senate. I’d say the chances are greater than 50-50. But this possibility — combined with
the fading of Obamacare as an issue — is entirely consistent with the view that Obamacare is not the
primary reason Dem control of the Senate is at risk. Rather, the problem is the makeup of the map and
the tendency of Dem voter groups to sit out midterms. Would Obama be more popular and less of a
drag on Dems if not for the ACA? That’s possible. But it’s hard to disentangle Obama’s broader
unpopularity from opinion on the law.
Marijuana measures empirically boost young voter turnout—flips the election
Gibson, 8/11 (William E., 8/11/2014, “Medical marijuana ballot issue may draw new voters;
Amendments, governor's race spur interest in midterm elections,” http://articles.sunsentinel.com/2014-08-11/news/fl-voter-turnout-boost-20140808_1_women-voters-new-votersmedical-marijuana-amendment, JMP)
Getting young people engaged in politics is never easy, but voter-registration volunteers say the
medical-marijuana amendment on November's ballot is attracting new voters who otherwise might not
bother with a midterm election.
Both political parties for more than a year have been knocking on doors to energize supporters who
might be lured to the polls by a heated governor's race. Democrats are especially eager to avoid the
usual big drop-off of turnout in nonpresidential elections, which tends to hurt their party's candidates.
But the wild card this year — the factor most likely to motivate new voters — appears to be the
marijuana measure, along with another constitutional amendment that would provide special state
funding to conserve environmentally sensitive land.
"Young people are very unfamiliar with other elections going on but have heard about the medicalmarijuana amendment and are excited to have an opportunity to vote for that," said Anna Eskamani, 23,
a volunteer with the League of Women Voters who recruited passers-by at a farmers' market in Orlando
last week.
"It's definitely going to be a hot topic that will get young people out and, of course, encourage them to
vote on other things as well."
The proposed amendment would legalize marijuana for patients diagnosed with debilitating health
problems. Although it would directly affect a relatively small number of people, it has drawn widespread
interest because many voters see it leading to a broader decriminalization of marijuana. A recent
statewide poll by Quinnipiac University found that 88 percent of voters supported it.
The environmental amendment would devote a portion of state excise taxes to conserving land and
wildlife.
"It has to do with drinking water and protecting our rivers and lakes and the Everglades. That's an issue
a lot people do feel strongly about," said Lynne Joshi, president of the League of Women Voters in
Broward County. "With the amendments, we have a chance, especially with the younger people, for
more people to turn out."
A League forum in West Palm Beach last month to discuss the environmental amendment drew enough
voters to fill a school auditorium.
"There are always those voters who would not come out and do such a thing until they feel there's a
direct effect on them," said Geanine Wester, the League president in Palm Beach County.
If the parties and registration groups succeed, the 2014 election will buck a seesaw trend in Florida
marked by wild swings in turnout rates among registered voters. Turnout soared from 47 percent in the
2006 midterm election to 75 percent in the 2008 presidential election. The rate plunged to 49 percent in
the 2010 midterms, then rose to 72 percent in the 2012 presidential election.
Most registration campaigns target young adults and Hispanics because they are the most inclined to
vote in presidential-election years but skip midterms.
"In parts of Orlando, Osceola County and South Florida, you don't see a drop-off, you see a plunge," said
Christian Ulvert, political director of the Florida Democratic Party. "You see turnout in areas with high
Hispanic voters go from 88 percent in a presidential year down to 25 or 26 percent in a gubernatorial
year."
The party is trying to counter the trend by emphasizing the importance of midterm elections.
The Democratic National Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, also
has hired Zach Learner, a Fort Lauderdale attorney, to head a Voter Expansion Project designed to help
overcome voter confusion and perceived barriers. He will lead a small army of volunteer lawyers to
educate people about voting methods — such as early voting, mail-in voting and provisional ballots —
and to safeguard their rights at polling places.
Many volunteers were inspired by the tumultuous 2000 presidential election, decided in Florida after
five weeks of recounts and disputes.
"I saw what happened in 2000, and I became concerned that citizens were either not going to be able to
vote or might not understand what they needed to do to allow them to vote," said Jason B. Blank, of
Fort Lauderdale, a volunteer attorney ready to advise voters who run into problems.
Republicans, meanwhile, are culling through vast amounts of data on Floridians to spot potential likeminded voters who might be inclined to support Scott. They call it "the largest micro-targeting project in
Florida history."
"It's millions of data points on voters that have been assembled, and it can help predict which voters are
likely to support the governor," said Susan Hepworth, communications director for the state
Republicans.
Even a slight increase in registration and turnout could tip the results of a close election.
"On the margins, the marijuana amendment may bring people to the polls who normally wait till there's
a presidential candidate on the ballot," said Daniel Smith, political science professor at the University of
Florida. "It may only be a couple of percentage points, but that could make all the difference."
GOP Senate key to Asia Pivot
Keck, 14 --- Managing Editor of The Diplomat and interned at the U.S. Congress where he worked on
defense issues(4/22/2014, Zachary, “The Midterm Elections and the Asia Pivot; The Republican Party
taking the Senate in the 2014 elections could be a boon for the Asia Pivot,”
http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/the-midterm-elections-and-the-asia-pivot/, JMP)
There is a growing sense in the United States that when voters go to the polls this November, the Republican Party will win enough Senate
seats to control both houses of Congress. This would potentially introduce more gridlock into an already dysfunctional American political
system. But it needn’t be all doom and gloom for U.S. foreign policy, including in the Asia-Pacific. In fact, the
Republicans wrestling
control of the Senate from the Democrats this November could be a boon for the U.S. Asia pivot. This is
true for at least three reasons. First, with little prospect of getting any of his domestic agenda through Congress, President Barack Obama will
naturally focus his attention on foreign affairs. Presidents in general have
a tendency to focus more attention on foreign
policy during their second term, and this effect is magnified if the other party controls the legislature. And
for good reason: U.S. presidents have far more latitude to take unilateral action in the realm of foreign affairs
than in domestic policy. Additionally, the 2016 presidential election will consume much of the country’s media’s attention on domestic matters.
It’s only when acting on the world stage that the president will still be able to stand taller in the media’s eyes than the candidates running to for
legislative office. Second, should the Democrats get pummeled in the midterm elections this year, President Obama
is likely to make some personnel changes in the White House and cabinet. For instance, after the Republican Party incurred losses in the 2006
midterms, then-President George W. Bush quickly moved to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the less partisan (at least in that
era) Robert Gates. Obama followed suit by making key personnel changes after the Democrats “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections.
Should the Democrats face a similar fate in the 2014 midterm elections, Obama
is also likely to make notable personnel
changes. Other aides, particular former Clinton aides, are likely to leave the administration early in order to start vying for spots on Hillary
Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign. Many of these changes are likely to be with domestic advisors given that domestic issues are certain
to decide this year’s elections. Even so, many nominally domestic positions—such as Treasury and Commerce Secretary—have important
implications for U.S. policy in Asia. Moreover, some
of the post-election changes are likely be foreign policy and
defense positions, which bodes well for Asia given the appalling lack of Asia expertise among Obama’s
current senior advisors. But the most important way a Republican victory in November will help the Asia Pivot is that the GOP in
Congress are actually more favorable to the pivot than are members of Obama’s own party. For example,
Congressional opposition to granting President Trade Promotional Authority — which is key to getting the TransPacific Partnership ratified — is largely from Democratic legislators. Similarly, it is the Democrats who are
largely in favor of the defense budget cuts that threaten to undermine America’s military posture in
Asia. If Republicans do prevail in November, President Obama will naturally want to find ways to bridge the very wide
partisan gap between them. Asia offers the perfect issue area to begin reaching across the aisle. The Republicans
would have every incentive to reciprocate the President’s outreach. After all, by giving them control of the entire
Legislative Branch, American voters will be expecting some results from the GOP before they would be ostensibly be ready to elect them to the
White House in 2016. A Republican failure to achieve anything between 2014 and 2016 would risk putting the GOP in the same dilemma they
faced in the 1996 and 2012 presidential elections. Working
with the president to pass the TPP and strengthen
America’s military’s posture in Asia would be ideal ways for the GOP to deliver results without violating
their principles. Thus, while the president will work tirelessly between now and November to help the Democrats retain the Senate, he
should also prepare for failure by having a major outreach initiative to Congressional Republicans ready on day one. This initiative should be
Asia-centric.
Solves Asian wars
Lohman 13 – MA in Foreign Affairs @ UVA (Walter, “Honoring America’s Superpower
Responsibilities,” http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/06/honoring-americas-superpowerresponsibilities)
When you withdraw from the world, either by imposing trade barriers or drawing down military commitments, you lose your
ability to influence events.¶ Those considering an Asia with less American presence have to ask
themselves whether freedom would do as well without us. In fact, proponents of American withdrawal have to ask
themselves a more important question: Whether they have responsibility for anyone’s well-being but their own!¶ Times are, indeed,
changing in Asia. Power is shifting. I have traveled to Asia quite a bit—easily 50 times over the course of my career. I’ve seen
the change first-hand. One thing that is not changing is that the U.S. is the one “indispensable” ingredient
for continued peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world. Everyone I talk to in Asia tells me that. They must be
talking to President Obama, too, because he’s also used the word “indispensable” to describe America’s role in the world.¶ Of course,
these countries want access to our markets and our capital. But on
the diplomatic side, it is also the case that the U.S.
is the closest thing in Asia to an honest broker. And because if anything, nationalist tensions in Asia are
only growing, this is not going to change anytime soon. Sure, there are South Koreans who would rather not have
American troops in their country. But they are not the majority. And they like us a whole heck of a lot more than they like the prospect of
another invasion. They like us a lot better than they like the Japanese. Imagine how the Koreans feel about the prospect of Japan acquiring
nuclear weapons to defend itself. That’s what they would have to do without the benefit of the American nuclear deterrent.
Causes extinction—outweighs
Mead 10 (Mead, senior fellow @ the Council on Foreign Relations, 2010 Walter, American Interest,
“Obama in Asia”, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/11/09/obama-in-asia/)
The decision to go to Asia is one that all thinking Americans can and should support regardless of either party or ideological
East and South Asia are the places where the 21st century, for better or for worse, will most
likely be shaped; economic growth, environmental progress, the destiny of democracy and success
against terror are all at stake here. American objectives in this region are clear. While convincing China that its best interests
affiliation.
are not served by a rash, Kaiser Wilhelm-like dash for supremacy in the region, the US does not want either to isolate or contain China. We
Our destiny is inextricably linked
with Asia’s; Asian success will make America stronger, richer and more secure. Asia’s failures will
reverberate over here, threatening our prosperity, our security and perhaps even our survival. The
world’s two most mutually hostile nuclear states, India and Pakistan, are in Asia. The two states
most likely to threaten others with nukes, North Korea and aspiring rogue nuclear power Iran, are
there. The two superpowers with a billion plus people are in Asia as well. This is where the world’s
fastest growing economies are. It is where the worst environmental problems exist. It is the home
of the world’s largest democracy, the world’s most populous Islamic country (Indonesia — which is also among the most
want a strong, rich, open and free China in an Asia that is also strong, rich, open and free.
democratic and pluralistic of Islamic countries), and the world’s most rapidly rising non-democratic power as well. Asia holds more oil
resources than any other continent; the world’s most important and most threatened trade routes lie off its shores. East Asia, South Asia,
Central Asia (where American and NATO forces are fighting the Taliban) and West Asia (home among others to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey
and Iraq) are the theaters in the world today that most directly engage America’s vital interests and where our armed forces are most
directly involved. The world’s most explosive territorial disputes are in Asia as well, with islands (and the
surrounding mineral and fishery resources) bitterly disputed between countries like Russia, the two Koreas, Japan, China (both from Beijing
and Taipei), and Vietnam. From the streets of Jerusalem to the beaches of Taiwan the world’s most
intractable political
problems are found on the Asian landmass and its surrounding seas. Whether you view the world in
terms of geopolitical security, environmental sustainability, economic growth or the march of
democracy, Asia is at the center of your concerns. That is the overwhelming reality of world politics today, and that
reality is what President Obama’s trip is intended to address.
1NC DA
US-Mexico cooperation’s high now, counter-drug efforts have widespread support
Heinle et al 14—research associate and editor for Justice in Mexico based in the Department
of Political Science & International Relations at the University of San Diego
(Kimberly, with Octavio Ferreira and David Shirk, “Drug Violence in Mexico”, Justice in Mexico Project Special Report, April
2014, dml)
A somewhat unexpected change under Peña Nieto with just over a year in office has been the degree
of continuity in the U.S.-Mexican security relationship across
administrations. Under President Calderón, U.S.-Mexico securitycooperation appeared to be at a high water
mark. Calderón negotiated the three-year 1.4 billion Mérida Agreement with President George W. Bush,
as both argued that the United States had a shared responsibility to
support Mexico’s counter-drug efforts. The program continued at a similar rate of annual
funding under President Barack Obama, and developed a new framework based on four main areas or “pillars” of collaboration:
1) combatting organized crime, 2) judicial sector reform, 3) improved border security, and 4) promoting community resilience.
Among other things, the program bolstered U.S.-Mexican intelligence sharing to dismantle organized crime groups, Mexican judicial
and law enforcement capacity, southbound inspections to detect illicit bulk cash and arms shipments, and investments in crime
prevention programs. Thanks to the program, U.S. officials regularly expressed great praise and admiration for President Calderón,
frequently emphasizing his courage in the fight against organized crime.
Stronger security ties with the United States goes against the grain of traditional Mexican
nationalist sentiments, attributable to multiple U.S. encroachments on Mexico’s sovereignty in the past. Yet, despite
such sentiments, large numbers of Mexicans hold the United States in high
regard and many actively supported the idea of greater U.S. involvement in
the drug war in Mexico. Thus, while the PeñaNieto administration insisted that U.S.-Mexico
security cooperation would be reined in, many aspects of cooperation have
continued. Early in his term, administrative officials asserted that U.S.- Mexico security relations would
now be more centrally managed through the “single window" (ventanilla única) of Mexico’s interior ministry,. 67 This
is in part because of the close ties and tremendous interdependence that have
developed between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agencies working toward common
objectives. Indeed, such cooperation helped Peña Nieto take down the leaders of the powerful
Sinaloa Cartel and the notoriously violent Zetas as well as key leaders in the Gulf Cartel.
The plan destroys relations
Murray et al 11—Elliott School of International Affairs/Inter-American Drug Abuse Control
Commission
(Chad, with Ashlee Jackson, Amanda Miralrio and Nicolas Eiden, “Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations and Marijuana: The
Potential Effects of U.S. Legalization”, https://elliott.gwu.edu/sites/elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/acad/lahs/mexico-marijuana071111.pdf, dml)
Relations between the U.S. and Mexico will deteriorate in the short-term if the
U.S. legalizes marijuana. Relations between the United States and Mexico have improved over the last
decade, and President Obama and President Calderón continue to work diligently to maintain relations and combat drugs. However, this
relationship is likely to decay even if the United States legalizes marijuana in only a de
facto manner on the state level. Last year President Calderón openly expressed his distaste for Proposition 19 before it was
defeated in November. He believes that any form of legalization of marijuana in the United States would be a
sign of hypocrisy as evident when he stated, “I think they [United States] have very little moral
authority to condemn a Mexican farmer who for hunger is planting marijuana to sustain the
insatiable North American market for drugs.”86 Although PresidentCalderón has acknowledged the fact that the drug
policy debate needs to take place, he has been adamant that legalization in the United States is not the best
policy. In addition, other Latin American leaders, such as Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, have expressed their support of
President Calderón‟s position on the legalization of marijuana.
President Calderón
and others believe that the legalization of marijuana in the United
States would delegitimize the Mexican war on drugs. Some scholars note that if the United States
legalized marijuana, the Mexicanpopulace would be left wondering, “What team are you [United
States] playing for?”87 Mexico has spent a lot of blood and
treasure fighting against DTOs over the last few years, and some feel that the legalization of
marijuana in the United States, no matter how well intentioned, would be negating those
efforts . Proof of the seriousness of Mexico‟s dedication to the drug war is evidenced by the recent tensions between the United
States and Mexico.
Relations between the two countries have been terse ever since Wikileaks revealed that Ambassador Pascual wrote that he did not
believe that President Calderón could win the war on drugs. This caused such strife that Ambassador Pascual resigned in March
2011. President Calderónhas been dedicated to helping Mexico combat drugs, and he was unwilling to allow a U.S. Ambassador to
openly criticize his efforts. If President Calderón was this forceful of the Wikileaks incident,
the legalization of marijuana in the U.S.would likely be trying on the bilateral
relationship. How far this distancing would go is up for debate, given Mexico‟s dependence on U.S. trade and counternarcotics aid programs.
Relations are high but they’re fragile—the plan decks a laundry list of cooperation
efforts including—
[ ] immigration reform
[ ] TPP
[ ] shale development
[ ] trade—solves manufacturing and both economies
Wilson et al 13—Senior Associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars
(Christopher, with Eric Olson, Miguel Salazar, Andrew Selee and Duncan Wood, “New Ideas for a New Era: Policy Options for the
Next Stage in U.S.-Mexico Relations”, Woodrow Wilson Center Publications, May 2013, dml)
U.S.-Mexico trade is booming, growing faster than U.S. trade with China and faster than it did after NAFTA took effect in
the 1990s. In a way that cannot be said for drugs, violence, or illegal immigration, focusing on the creation of jobs and improving the
competitiveness of manufacturers on both sides of the border is a good-news story. Greater focus on this dimension of the
relationship could potentially change the tone of the relationship in a way that makes the stickier issues of security
and migration a little less intractable. Progress on the economic agenda, including intraregional
efforts to move goods and services across the border more efficiently as well as cooperation on global trade issues like the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, could provide a significant boost to both the U.S. and
Mexican economies.
While economic issues are likely to see increased attention, much of the day to day work in the bilateral relationship
will remain focused on security. There are signs that overall levels of organized crimerelated violence in Mexico finally began to decline in 2012 after several years of growth, though much work
remains to be done on issues of public security and criminal justice reform in Mexico, drug consumption in the
United States, and the trafficking ofweapons, drugs and illicit funds between the two countries.
Fortunately, over the past six years an unprecedented level of cooperation between the U.S. and
Mexican governments and their many law enforcement and national security agencies has been
achieved, leaving a legacy of increased understand- ing and trust. Efforts must now be made by both
sides to consolidate these gains in the context of the new security strategy being defined by the
Mexican administration, the change in personnel in Mexico after the election, the strengthening of Mexico’s Secretariat of
Internal Affairs (Gobernación) and the organizational changes affecting the Secretariat of Public Security.
On the question of migration, there has been a shift in internal politics in the U.S. that
permits a
more open debate on immigration than at any time in recent memory, with a
bipartisan willingness to considermeaningful reform of immigration laws. This happens at the same time
as we have seen a significant drop in migration flows from Mexico, high levels of reverse migration and a
more robust economy in Mexico begin- ning to create more jobs south of the border.
Since 2007, the number of Mexican migrants illegally entering the United States has dropped to historically low levels, with a net
outflow of unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. over the past three years. The drop is partially because of the weak U.S. economy,
but it also has to do with more effective U.S. border enforcement and bet- ter economic opportunities in Mexico. This shift,
along with a newfound bipartisan willingness to pursue immigration reform after the 2012 presidential
election in the United States, offers thepotential for both countries to explore new approaches to
migration for the first time in a decade. In the United States, policymakers have an opportunity to look
especially at how to reform the legal immigration system so that the country can ensure it has
the human capital needed, at all skill levels, to fuel in- novation and growth. Mexican policymakers, on
the other hand, have opportunities to consolidate Mexico’s burgeoning middle class in those communities where migration has been
a feature of life so as to make sure that people no longer need to leave the country to get ahead. Mexico could also facilitate
U.S. reform efforts by indicating how they could help cooperate with a new U.S. visa system if the U.S.
Congress moves forward on a legal immigration reform.
In the area of energy policy, there is a realistic chance
that the Peña Nieto govern- ment will be able to
secure the passing of energy reform legislation that opens up Mexico’s oil and gas industry
to private and foreign participation. This development, should it come to pass, will drive forward
higher levels of investment and cooperation by U.S. hydrocarbons firms in Mexico. Particularly
in the area of shale gas and shale oil, it is U.S. firms that possess the technology and expertise that will
be required to develop Mexico’s resources. On environmental issues connected to the oil and gas sec- tor there is
a pressing need for bilateral cooperation on standards and implementation, especially in light of
the Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement covering oil explo- ration in the border regions of the Gulf of Mexico.
1NC CP
The United States should offer federal policy waivers for hemp
production.
The counterplan solves the aff while avoiding the pitfalls of full legalization
Caulkins et al 2012 (Jonathan P [Stever professor of operation research and public policy @ Carnegie
Mellon], Angela Hawken [Associate prof of public policy @ Pepperdine], Beau Kilmer [co-director of the
RAND Drug Research Center], and Mark AR Kleiman [Prof of public policy @ UCLA]; Marijuana
Legalization; Oxford University Press; p. 227-9; kdf)
Could the United States allow industrial hemp without legalizing marijuana? Certainly. Many nations legalized
industrial hemp production in the 1990s while continuing prohibition of marijuana as a psychoactive drug. Different strains of cannabis-and
different parts of any given plant-produce very different levels of the plant's psychoactive agents. Typically, laws
allowing industrial
hemp require the use of very-low-THC strains (less than 1 percent or even 0.3 percent THC, compared to the 4-18 percent
characteristic of cannabis produced and sold as a drug). So there's a reasonably bold line between industrial hemp and intoxicating marijuana.
But it's hard to imagine that the passionate advocacy of industrial hemp is unrelated to its link to drug policy. Groups such as the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have picked up the hemp crusade in order to claim the benefits of industrial hemp as
an advantage of marijuana legalization. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the politics of marijuana are no exception. Oddly, the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other advocates of
continued prohibition agree with hemp advocates in linking
the industrialhemp and drug-legalization questions. But they do so from the opposite perspective, arguing that industrial
hemp should not be legalized because it would complicate efforts to enforce prohibition against use as an intoxicant. One DEA concern is that
farmers could line the outside of their fields with low-THC (industrial) cannabis while growing high-THC (intoxicating) cannabis in the middle.
Since relatively few acres would be needed to supply the intoxicant market, allowing free cultivation of industrial hemp could indeed pose an
enforcement challenge. (Even the upper estimate of s,ooo metric tons of intoxicating cannabis consumed in the United States could be supplied
by less than a third of the acreage Canada cultivates for industrial hemp.) However, unregulated, laissez-faire production is not the only
alternative to complete prohibition. Authorities in
other countries use stringent protocols for the licensure, seed
selection, and inspection of hemp operations to monitor the hemp production process. Prospective growers
have to submit substantial paperwork, complete a background check, and join a professional hemp association to become sanctioned
producers. Governments also require farmers to grow specific approved hemp varieties that fall under the THC threshold. Farms are subject to
annual visits by inspectors and sometimes to aerial surveillance. Farms are valuable assets that would be vulnerable to seizure and forfeiture if
farmers were found to be producing illegal (intoxicating) forms of cannabis. There
are also purely technical barriers to hiding
pot plants in fields of industrial hemp. For example, fiber hemp plants are planted close together to encourage tall vertical stalks
with few leaves. Moreover, hemp fiber is harvested early, before the intoxicant- bearing flowers are ready. Marijuana grown amid industrial
hemp would probably have to be the low-value, relatively lowTHe commercial grade rather than higher-value sinsemilla, because the pollen
produced by the hemp plants would pollinate the drug plants. (Sinsemilla comes from unfertilized female cannabis plants.) Indeed, some
medical marijuana growers in California oppose a proposed law permitting an industrial hemp pilot project because they fear hemp pollen
might ruin their harvest. Canadian industrial hemp farmers try to ensure that their crops are at least three miles from any wild or cultivated
cannabis to ensure pedigreed hempseed production; studies show cannabis pollen can travel three to twelve miles. The really convincing
evidence is negative. Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark in the night, the absence of any reports from Europe of diversion from
industrial hemp farms into the drug market argues for the success of these regulations. In sum, while legal industrial hemp production could
create a Trojan horse for the production of intoxicating marijuana, there is no real problem in creating regulations to limit diversion.
Hemp growth is prohibited now—DEA enforcement’s based on statute and creates
effective criminalization
Thedinger 6—J.D., University of Colorado School of Law, real name actually is Seaton Thedinger
(Seaton, “NOTE & COMMENT: Prohibition in the United States: International and U.S. Regulation and Control of Industrial Hemp”, 17 COLO. J.
INT'L ENVTL. L. & POL'Y 419, Spring, 2006, lexis, dml)
The DEA classifies "any product that contains any amount of tetrahydrocannabinols (THC) to be a schedule I
controlled substance, even if such product is made from portions of the cannabis plant that are
excluded from the CSA definition of "marihuana.'" n159 Today, this ban extends to all hemp products
marketed in the United States, including paper, clothing, birdseed, food, lotions, and other products containing hemp. n160
Because these products contain trace amounts of THC, the DEA considers the products covered by the
CSA ban. n161 This position stems from the plain language of the statute which states, "any material, compound,
mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of [THC]" is a schedule I controlled substance. n162 The DEA uses this statutory
language to justify a complete ban on any product containing THC. n163
The DEA additionally justifies the classification of industrial hemp as a controlled substance based upon the legislative
history of the [*436] Marihuana Tax Act and the CSA. n164 The DEA determined that Congress exempted certain parts
of the marijuana plant from taxation in 1937 assuming that those parts were free from THC. n165 The DEA
concluded that if Congress at the time had known that the stalk and industrial portions of the plant
contained THC, they would have included industrial hemp plants in the definition. n166 However, the DEA
failed to consider that Congress recognized the many legitimate commercial and industrial uses of industrial hemp and intentionally excluded it
from the definition of marijuana. n167
Armed with this interpretation of the CSA, the DEA was poised to ban all hemp products in the United
States by March 2002, effectively creating a new law. n168 Under the ban, anyone selling hemp
products, including food and clothing, would be prosecuted for selling marijuana and, if convicted, face long prison
sentences. n169 Companies like Wild Oats Markets, Inc. began taking hemp food products off their shelves, and furthermore, several small
hemp food producers lost large amounts of money. n170
1NC K
The law is founded upon an exclusion of life, a line drawn between acceptance and
deviance that informs the state as to what constitutes legitimate violence. The
affirmative’s extension of legality relies on a Western system of legality that is
always founded on exclusion and violence against the non-human.
Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik “Species War: Law, Violence and Animals”)
The distinction between bare life and the good life is a legal-political distinction . It
has, at least since Aristotle, resided at the foundation of Western legal and
political theory. The law which holds together and governs the political community is posited with the view of not merely
sustaining the bare needs of life, but of establishing and realizing some form of the good life. However, the
distinction between bare life and the good life already containswithin it a prior distinction, one
which arises when the survival of humans is distinguished from and affirmed against the
survival of non-human animals. At the basis of the distinction between bare life and the good life, and hence, at the
basis of law, resides the human-animal distinction – a determination of value that
the human form of life is good and that it is worth more or better than the
lives of non-human animals. There is a certain Nietzschean sense of the term “good” which can be drawn upon
informatively here. My argument is that what occurs prior to the racial and aristocratic senses of the term “good” suggested
by Nietzsche as residing genealogically with the concept of the “good life,” is more deeply, an elevated sense
of
life-worth that humans in the West have historically ascribed to themselves over and above the
life-worth of non-human animals. Following this, when the meaning of the term “war” is explained
by legal and political theorists with reference to either the concepts of survival or the good life, the linguistic
and conceptual use of the term war already contains within it a value-laden human-animal
distinction and the primary violence of species
war. Survival and the biological imperative (survive!) maybe seen as components of a concept
of “war” broadly defined. For non-human animals the killing and violence that takes place between them (and with respect
to their eating of plant life) may be viewed not as species war but merely as action driven by the biological imperative. However, for
humans the acts of killing and violence directed at non-human animals can be understood as species
war. While such violence and killing may be thought to be driven, in part, by the biological
imperative, these acts also take place within the context of normative
judgmentsmade with respect to a particular notion of the good often drawing upon a cosmic
hierarchy of life-value established by religious theories of creation or scientific theories of evolution. This reflection need not be seen
as carried out by every individual on a daily basis but rather as that which is drawn upon from time to time within public life as
humans inter-subjectively coordinate their actions in accordance with particular enunciated ends and plan for the future. In this
respect, the violence and killing of species war is not simply a question of survival or
bare life, instead, it is bound up with a consideration of the good. For most modern humans in the West the
“good life” involves the daily killing of animals for dietary need and for pleasure. At the heartof the question of species
war, and all war for that matter, resides a question about the legitimacy of violence linked to a
philosophy of value. The question of war-law sits within a wider history of decision making about the relative values of
different forms of life. “Legitimate” violence is under-laid by cultural, religious, moral, political and
philosophical conceptions about the relative values of forms of life. Playing out through
history aredistinctions and hierarchies of life-value that are extensions of
the original human-animal distinction. Distinctions that can be thought to follow from the
human-animal distinction are those, for example, drawn between: Hellenes and barbarians;
Europeans and Orientals; whites and blacks; the “civilized” and the “uncivilized”; Nazis and
Jews; Israeli’s and Arabs; colonizers and the colonized. Historically these practices and regimes
of violence have been culturally, politically and legally normalized in a manner that replicates
the normalization of the violence carried out against non-human animals. Unpacking, criticizing and
challenging the forms of violence, which in different historical moments appear as “normal,” is one of the ongoing tasks of any critic
who is concerned with the question of what war does to law and of what law does to war? The critic of war is thus a critic of war’s
normalization. Unpacking,
criticizing and challenging the forms of violence, which in
different historical moments appear as "normal," is one of the ongoing tasks of any
critic who is concerned with the question of what war does to law and of what law does to war? The
critic of war is thus a critic of war's norm-alization.
And the hierarchy between the human and nonhuman leads to billions of deaths
per year and categorically outweighs. Unabated anthropocentrism is the only thing
which can guarantee planetary extinction
Best 7 – Associate Professor at the University of Texas in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy (Steven, “Eternal
Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson” Journal for Critical Animal
Studies,http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_7/bestpatterson.pdf)
Too many people with pretences to ethics, compassion, decency, justice, love, and other stellar values of humanity at its finest resist
the profound analogies between animal and human slavery and animal and
human holocausts, in order todevalue or trivialize animal suffering and avoid the
responsibility of the weighty moral issues confronting them. The moral myopia of
humanism is blatantly evident when people who have been victimized by violence and
oppression decry the fact that they “were treated like animals” – as if it is acceptable to
brutalize animal, but not humans. If there is a salient disanalogy or discontinuity between the
tyrannical pogroms launched against animals and humans, it lies not in the fallacious assumption that animals do not
suffer physical and mental pain similar to humans, but rather that animals suffer more than humans, both
quantitatively (the intensity of their torture, such as they endure in fur farms, factory farms, and experimental
laboratories) and qualitatively (the number of those who suffer and die). And while
few oppressed human groups lack moral backing, sometimes on an international scale, one
finds not mass solidarity with animals but rather mass consumption of them. As another Nobel Prize
writer in Literature, South African novelist writer J. M. Coetzee, forcefully stated: “Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of
degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-
Every year , throughout the
world, over 45 billion farmed animals currently are killed for food consumption .38 This staggering
number is nearly eight times the present human population . In the US alone, over 10 billion animals are killed
each year for food consumption – 27 million each day, nearly 19,000 per minute. Of the 10 billion land animals killed each
regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”37
year in the US, over 9 billion are chickens; every day in the US, 23 million chickens are killed for human consumption, 269 per second. In addition to
the billions of land animals consumed, humans also kill and consume 85 billion marine animals (17 billion in the US).39 Billions
more animals die in the name of science, entertainment, sport, or fashion (i.e., the leather, fur, and wool
ever more animal species vanish from the earth as
we enter the sixth great extinction crisis in the planet’s history, this one caused by human not
natural events, the last one occurring 65 million years ago with the demise of the dinosaurs and 90% of all
industries), or on highways as victims of cars and trucks. Moreover,
species on the planet . It is thus appropriate to recall the saying by English clergyman and writer, William Ralph Inge, to the effect that:
"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able
to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."
The construction of industrial stockyards, the total objectification of nonhuman animals, and the mechanized murder of innocent beings should have
If humans had not
exploited animals, moreover, they might not have exploited humans, or, at the very least, they would
not have had handy conceptual models and technologies for enforcing domination over others. “A
better understanding of these connections,” Patterson states, “should help make our
planet a more humane and livable place for all of us – people and animals alike, A new awareness is
essential for the survival of our endangered planet .”40
sounded a loud warning to humanity that such a process might one day be applied to them, as it was in Nazi Germany.
The alternative is a refusal of sovereign power to draw lines between inside and
outside – any other approach simply affirms sovereign power
Edkins and Pin-Fat 05. Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and
Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines
between zoe- and bios, inside and outside .59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power
relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or
technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to
mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are
not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for
the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is
free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw
any lines at all between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a
form of violence can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power
as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our
argument is thatwe can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting
sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign
ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it
(and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to
resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands.
The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the
lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to
sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and
preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s
drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn
differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing
‘ethos’ , an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacrior bare life.
1NC FEDERALISM
Cooperative federalism is resilient
Greve 2K (Michael, John G. Searle Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Ph.D.
(Government) Cornell University, 1987, “Against Cooperative Federalism” Mississippi Law
Journal, 70 Miss. L.J. 557, Lexis)
Cooperative federalism is enormously resilient and, moreover, self-stabilizing. The range of
conflict within the system is defined by the participant-beneficiaries' fight over the terms of
cooperation. State and local governments will complain about unfunded mandates and federal
imposition; national interest groups and their congressional patrons will complain about state
shirking and non-compliance.Furor over unfunded mandates produces more money and less
onerous federal conditions; interest group complaints over the states' failure to use federal block
grants for their intended purposes leads to the re-categorization of federal
programs. n150 Either way, the system returns to its bargaining equilibrium, typically at a
higher level of aggregate spending.
Under ordinary political conditions, cooperative arrangements are virtually immune to
political reform. In Germany and in the United States, cooperative federalism came under
challenge during periods of serious economic malaise and manifest civic alienation, coupled
with exogenous shocks (re-unification and European integration in Germany's case, and the
ascent of a determined, ideological administration in the United States). The record strongly
suggests that cooperative federalism is impregnable even under those disadvantageous
conditions.
AT: COMPETITIVENESS IMPACT
Dominance is inevitable
Price 10 – Miller-McCune Magazine,(Tom, 3/13 “U.S. Challenged for High-Tech Global Leadership,”
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/u-s-challenged-for-high-tech-global-leadership-10818/
Despite negative trends, U.S. R&D continues to lead the world by a large margin. In
2007, America’s $369 billion R&D spending exceeded all of Asia’s $338 billion and all of the
European Union’s $263 billion.The United States spent more than the next four countries —
Japan, China, Germany and France — combined.
America’s share of all high-tech manufacturing has risen — and it continues to lead the
world — even though the U.S. share of
exports has declined. That’s because the United States consumes so much of its
product domestically. The United States makes nearly a third of the world’s high-tech
goods, compared with the European Union’s 25 percent and China’s 14 percent. It’s the world leader in
communications,semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and aerospace. It trails only the EU in
scientific instruments and China in computers.
U.S. inventors obtained 81,000 U.S. patents in 2008, more than double Japan’s 35,000 and all of Europe’s 23,000.
America’s 49 percent share of those patents dropped from 55 percent in 1995.
U.S. inventors also led in what the report calls “high-value” patents — those that were given
protection by the EU and Japan as well as by the United States. The U.S. share of 30 percent was down
from 34 percent in 1997.
China obtained just about 1 percent of both kinds of patents. But its scientists have
become the second-most-prolific contributors to scholarly journals, another area in which the United States continues to
lead the world.
The globalization of science is illustrated by the worldwide growth in many measures of scientific prowess, no matter which
countries dominate, the board said. For example, high-tech exports more than tripled to $2.3 trillion worldwide between
1995 and 2008. The estimated number of researchers increased to 5.7 million in 2007 from 4 million in 1995. Global R&D
expenditures totaled $1.1 trillion in 2007, up from $525 billion in 1996. Cross-boarder co-authorship also increased from 8
percent of scientific articles published in 1988 to 22 percent in 2007.
Foreign corporations actually invested more in U.S.-based research ($34 billion)
in 2006 than U.S. firms invested overseas $28.5 billion. Both more than doubled since 1995.
No retaliation—definitely no escalation
Mueller 5 (John, Professor of Political Science – Ohio State University, Reactions and Overreactions to
Terrorism, http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/NB.PDF)
However, history
clearly demonstrates that overreaction is not necessarily inevitable.
Sometimes, in fact, leaders have been able to restrain their instinct to overreact. Even more
important, restrained reaction--or even capitulation to terrorist acts--has often
proved to be entirely acceptable politically. That is, there are many instances where
leaders did nothing after a terrorist attack (or at least refrained from overreacting) and did
not suffer politically or otherwise. Similarly, after an unacceptable loss of American lives in Somalia in 1993, Bill
Clinton responded by withdrawing the troops without noticeable negative impact on his 1996 re-election bid. Although
Clinton responded with (apparently counterproductive) military retaliations after the two U.S. embassies were bombed in
Africa in 1998 as discussed earlier, his administration did not have a notable response to terrorist attacks on American targets
in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers) in 1996 or to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and these non-responses never caused
it political pain. George W. Bush's response to the anthrax attacks of 2001 did include, as noted above, a costly and wasteful
stocking-up of anthrax vaccine and enormous extra spending by the U.S. Post Office. However, beyond that, it was the same
as Clinton's had been to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993 and in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the
same as the one applied in Spain when terrorist bombed trains there in 2004 or in Britain after attacks in 2005: the dedicated
application of police work to try to apprehend the perpetrators. This approach was politically acceptable even though the
culprit in the anthrax case (unlike the other ones) has yet to be found. The demands for retaliation may be somewhat more
problematic in the case of suicide terrorists since the direct perpetrators of the terrorist act are already dead, thus sometimes
impelling a vengeful need to seek out other targets. Nonetheless, the attacks in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain,
and against the Cole were all suicidal, yet no direct retaliatory action was taken. Thus, despite short-term
demands that some sort of action must be taken, experience suggests politicians can
often successfully ride out this demand after the obligatory (and inexpensive) expressions
of outrage are prominently issued.
Too many obstacles—look at aggregate probability
Pinker, 11 [Steven, professor of psychology at Harvard University, The Better Angels of our Nature Why
Violence Has Declined, ISBN: 067002295, for online access email alexanderdpappas@gmail.com and I
will forward you the full book]
Though conventional terrorism, as John Kerry gaffed, is a nuisance to be policed rather than a threat to the fabric of life, terrorism with weapons of mass
destruction would be something else entirely. The prospect of an attack that would kill millions of people is not just theoretically possible but consistent with the
statistics of terrorism. The
computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young and the political scientist
Kristian Gleditsch plotted the death tolls of eleven thousand terrorist attacks on log-log paper and saw
them fall into a neat straight line.261 Terrorist attacks obey a power-law distribution, which means they
are generated by mechanisms that make extreme events unlikely, but not astronomically unlikely. The trio suggested a simple
model that is a bit like the one that Jean-Baptiste Michel and I proposed for wars, invoking nothing fancier than a combination of exponentials. As terrorists invest
more time into plotting their attack, the death toll can go up exponentially: a plot that takes twice as long to plan can kill, say, four times as many people. To be
concrete, an attack by a single suicide bomber, which usually kills in the single digits, can be planned in a few days or weeks. The
2004 Madrid train
bombings, which killed around two hundred, took six months to plan, and 9/11, which killed three
thousand, took two years.262 But terrorists live on borrowed time: every day that a plot drags on brings
the possibility that it will be disrupted, aborted, or executed prematurely. If the probability is constant,
the plot durations will be distributed exponentially. (Cronin, recall, showed that terrorist organizations
drop like flies over time, falling into an exponential curve.) Combine exponentially growing damage with an exponentially shrinking
chance of success, and you get a power law, with its disconcertingly thick tail. Given the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the real world, and religious
fanatics willing to wreak untold damage for a higher cause, a lengthy conspiracy producing a horrendous death toll is within the realm of thinkable probabilities. A
statistical model, of course, is not a crystal ball. Even
if we could extrapolate the line of existing data points, the massive terrorist
attacks in the tail are still extremely (albeit not astronomically) unlikely. More to the point, we can’t extrapolate it. In practice, as you get to the
tail of a power-law distribution, the data points start to misbehave, scattering around the line or warping it downward to very low probabilities. The statistical
spectrum of terrorist damage reminds us not to dismiss the worst-case scenarios, but it doesn’t tell us how likely they are. So how likely are they? What do you
think the chances are that within the next five years each of the following scenarios will take place? (1) One of the heads of state of a major developed country will
be assassinated. (2) A nuclear weapon will be set off in a war or act of terrorism. (3) Venezuela and Cuba will join forces and sponsor Marxist insurrection
movements in one or more Latin American countries. (4) Iran will provide nuclear weapons to a terrorist group that will use one of them against Israel or the United
States. (5) France will give up its nuclear arsenal. I gave fifteen of these scenarios to 177 Internet users on a single Web page and asked them to estimate the
probability of each. The median estimate that a nuclear bomb would be set off (scenario 2) was 0.20; the median estimate that a nuclear bomb would be set off in
the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran (scenario 4) was 0.25. About half the respondents judged that the second scenario was
more likely than the first. And in doing so, they committed an elementary blunder in the mathematics of probability. The probability of a conjunction of events (A
and B both occurring) cannot be greater than the probability of either of them occurring alone. The probability that you will draw a red jack has to be lower than the
probability that you will draw a jack, because some jacks you might draw are not red. Yet Tversky and Kahneman have shown that most people, including
statisticians and medical researchers, commonly make the error.263 Consider the case of Bill, a thirty-four-year-old man who is intelligent but also unimaginative,
compulsive, and rather dull. In school he was strong in mathematics but undistinguished in the arts and humanities. What are the chances that Bill plays jazz
saxophone? What are the chances that he is an accountant who plays jazz saxophone? Many people give higher odds to the second possibility, but the choice is
nonsensical, because there are fewer saxophone-playing accountants than there are saxophone players. In judging probabilities, people rely on the vividness of
their imaginations rather than thinking through the laws. Bill fits the stereotype of an accountant but not of a saxophonist, and our intuitions go with the
stereotype. The
conjunction fallacy, as psychologists call it, infects many kinds of reasoning. Juries are more likely to believe that a man with
shady business dealings killed an employee to prevent him from talking to the police than to believe that he killed the employee. (Trial lawyers thrive on this fallacy,
adding conjectural details to a scenario to make it more vivid to a jury, even though every additional detail, mathematically speaking, ought to make it less
probable.) Professional
forecasters give higher odds to an unlikely outcome that is presented with a
plausible cause (oil prices will rise, causing oil consumption to fall) than to the same outcome presented naked (oil consumption
will fall).264 And people are willing to pay more for flight insurance against terrorism than for flight insurance against all causes.265 You can see where I’m going.
The mental movie of an Islamist terrorist group buying a bomb on the black market or obtaining it from
a rogue state and then detonating it in a populated area is all too easy to play in our mind’s eye. Even if
it weren’t, the entertainment industry has played it for us in nuclear terrorist dramas like True Lies, The
Sum of All Fears, and 24. The narrative is so riveting that we are apt to give it a higher probability than we
would if we thought through all the steps that would have to go right for the disaster to happen and
multiplied their probabilities. That’s why so many of my survey respondents judged an Iran-sponsored nuclear terrorist attack to be more probable
than a nuclear attack. The point is not that nuclear terrorism is impossible or even astronomically unlikely. It is just that the probability
assigned to it by anyone but a methodical risk analyst is likely to be too high. What do I mean by “too high”? “With
certainty” and “more probable than not” strike me as too high. The physicist Theodore Taylor declared in 1974 that by 1990 it would be too late to prevent
terrorists from carrying out a nuclear attack.266 In
1995 the world’s foremost activist on the risks of nuclear terrorism,
Graham Allison, wrote that under prevailing circumstances, a nuclear attack on American targets was
likely before the decade was out.267 In 1998 the counterterrorism expert Richard Falkenrath wrote that “it is certain that
more and more non-state actors will become capable of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons
acquisition and use.”268 In 2003 UN ambassador John Negroponte judged that there was a “high probability” of an
attack with a weapon of mass destruction within two years. And in 2007 the physicist Richard Garwin estimated that the chance of a nuclear terrorist attack was 20
percent per year, or about 50 percent by 2010 and almost 90 percent within a decade.269 Like
television weather forecasters, the
pundits, politicians, and terrorism specialists have every incentive to emphasize the worst-case scenario.
It is undoubtedly wise to scare governments into taking extra measures to lock down weapons and fissile material and to monitor and infiltrate groups that might be
tempted to acquire them. Overestimating
the risk, then, is safer than underestimating it—though only up to a
point, as the costly invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction proves. The
professional reputations of experts have proven to be immune to predictions of disasters that never
happen, while almost no one wants to take a chance at giving the all-clear and ending up with
radioactive egg on his face.270 A few brave analysts, such as Mueller, John Parachini, and Michael Levi, have taken
the chance by examining the disaster scenarios component by component.271 For starters, of the four so-called weapons of
mass destruction, three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272 Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional
explosives wrapped in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would yield only minor and short-lived elevations of
radiation, comparable to moving to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released in an enclosed space like a subway (where they
would still not do as much damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was
responsible for a tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and
deploy, as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would develop them. It’s no wonder that biological and chemical weapons, though far more
accessible than nuclear ones, have been used in only three terrorist attacks in thirty years.273 In 1984 the Rajneeshee religious cult contaminated salad in the
restaurants of an Oregon town with salmonella, sickening 751 people and killing none. In 1990 the Tamil Tigers were running low on ammunition while attacking a
fort and opened up some chlorine cylinders they found in a nearby paper mill, injuring 60 and killing none before the gas wafted back over them and convinced
them never to try it again. The Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo failed in ten attempts to use biological weapons before releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo
subways, killing 12. A fourth attack, the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed 5 Americans in media and government offices, turned out to be a spree killing rather than
an act of terrorism. It’s really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym. Mueller
and Parachini have fact-checked the
various reports that terrorists got “just this close” to obtaining a nuclear bomb and found that all were
apocryphal. Reports of “interest” in procuring weapons on a black market grew into accounts of actual
negotiations, generic sketches morphed into detailed blueprints, and flimsy clues (like the aluminum
tubes purchased in 2001 by Iraq) were overinterpreted as signs of a development program. Each of the
pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.
There may have been a window of vulnerability in the safekeeping of nuclear weapons in Russia, but
today most experts agree it has been closed, and that no loose nukes are being peddled in a nuclear
bazaar. Stephen Younger, the former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, has said, “Regardless of what is reported in the news, all nuclear nations take the security of
their weapons very seriously.”274 Russia has an intense interest in keeping its weapons out of the hands
of Chechen and other ethnic separatist groups, and Pakistan is just as worried about its archenemy Al
Qaeda. And contrary to rumor, security experts consider the chance that Pakistan’s government and military
command will fall under the control of Islamist extremists to be essentially nil.275 Nuclear weapons have
complex interlocks designed to prevent unauthorized deployment, and most of them become
“radioactive scrap metal” if they are not maintained.276 For these reasons, the forty-seven-nation Nuclear Security Summit convened
by Barack Obama in 2010 to prevent nuclear terrorism concentrated on the security of fissile material, such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium, rather than
on finished weapons. The dangers of filched fissile material are real, and the measures recommended at the summit are patently wise, responsible, and overdue.
Still, one shouldn’t get so carried away by the image of garage nukes as to think they are inevitable or even extremely probable. The
safeguards that
are in place or will be soon will make fissile materials hard to steal or smuggle, and if they went missing,
it would trigger an international manhunt. Fashioning a workable nuclear weapon requires precision
engineering and fabrication techniques well beyond the capabilities of amateurs. The Gilmore commission,
which advises the president and Congress on WMD terrorism, called the challenge “Herculean,” and
Allison has described the weapons as “large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and
inefficient.”277 Moreover, the path to getting the materials, experts, and facilities in place is mined with
hazards of detection, betrayal, stings, blunders, and bad luck. In his book On Nuclear Terrorism, Levi laid out all the
things that would have to go right for a terrorist nuclear attack to succeed, noting, “Murphy’s Law of
Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong.”278 Mueller counts twenty obstacles on the path
and notes that even if a terrorist group had a fifty-fifty chance of clearing every one, the aggregate odds
of its success would be one in a million. Levi brackets the range from the other end by estimating that
even if the path were strewn with only ten obstacles, and the probability that each would be cleared
was 80 percent, the aggregate odds of success facing a nuclear terrorist group would be one in ten.
Those are not our odds of becoming victims. A terrorist group weighing its options, even with these
overly optimistic guesstimates, might well conclude from the long odds that it would better off devoting
its resources to projects with a higher chance of success. None of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only
that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable.
the aff provides funds for the Taliban- it has no enforcement mechanism to keep
them from skimming money off the top
Graham-Harrison 2013 (Emma; Afghanistan's cannabis production rises; Sep 10;
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/10/afghanistan-cannabis-farming-drop-taliban; kdf)
The amount of Afghan farmland planted with cannabis fell by nearly a fifth last year after one
province launched a fierce eradication campaign, but a bumper crop meant that actual production rose compared
with 2011, according to the UN. Officials in southern Uruzgan province, which borders Kandahar and Helmand, largely stamped out
farming of the drug because of worries it was financing the Taliban. In 2011 there were over 1,000 hectares of the
crop there, but last year under100 hectares were sown. "According to reports from the field, the reduction was
caused by a strictly enforced ban by provincial authorities, which was imposed because cannabis fields seemed to have been used by
insurgent groups as hiding places," the UN Cannabis Survey Report said. Planting in most other areas remained largely steady, with
just over half of commercial production concentrated in the south of the country. The report does not include "kitchen garden" plots
of the drug grown for personal use, but these produce relatively small amounts.Overall Afghanistan produced
1,400 tonnes of commercial cannabis resin in 2012, worth around $65 million, the report estimated. A
slightly smaller crop in 2011, when prices were higher, brought in nearly $100 million. Cannabisproduction in
Afghanistan is dwarfed by opium farming, which last year took up more than 10 times as much
farmland and produced a crop worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Afghanistan produces around 90% of
the world's opium supply. However many poppy farmers in the south plant a spring opium crop and, when it has been harvested,
turn to cannabis for the summer. "It seems that cannabis and opium are more complementary crops... than substitutes for each
other," the report said. Government efforts to stamp out poppy farming may even push up production of cannabis, the report
warned. Last year the UN said Afghanistan's importance as a source of resin for world markets might be growing as more farmers
switched to the crop. "With increasing pressure on poppy cultivation through eradication and other measures, the possibility
of the commercial production of cannabis gradually playing a much bigger role in the illicit
economy of Afghanistan is not beyond the realms ofimagination," the report said. Cannabis resin can be
much more lucrative than opium for individual farmers. It brings in over $1,500 in extra earnings per hectare, requires less weeding
and is comparatively easy to harvest. However the plants need irrigation at a time when streams fed by snow melt are drying up and
a long summer growing season can stop subsistence farmers planting vital food crops on the land. The regional representative for
the UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC), Jean-Luc Lemahieu, said that farmers balance "family needs, food security, access to
markets...[and] risk" when deciding what to plant each year, and explained that no one is simply "an opium farmer" "a cannabis
farmer" or a "wheat farmer".
No war—mutual interest and pressure for restraint
Mutti 9 – over a decade of expertise covering on South Asia geopolitics, Contributing Editor to
Demockracy journal (James, 1/5, Mumbai Misperceptions: War is Not Imminent,
http://demockracy.com/four-reasons-why-the-mumbai-attacks-wont-result-in-a-nuclear-war/)
Writer Amitav Ghosh divined a crucial connection between the two messages. “When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11, they are in effect pushing the
Indian government to mount a comparable response.” Indeed, India’s opposition Hindu nationalist BJP has blustered, “Our response must be close to what the
American response was.” Fearful
of imminent war, the media has indulged in frantic hand wringing about Indian
and Pakistani nuclear arsenals and renewed fears about the Indian subcontinent being “the most dangerous place on earth.”
As an observer of the subcontinent for over a decade, I am optimistic that war will not be the end result of this event. As horrifying as the Mumbai attacks were,
they are not likely to drive India and Pakistan into an armed international conflict. The media frenzy over an imminent nuclear war seems the result of the media
being superficially knowledgeable about the history of Indian-Pakistani relations, of feeling compelled to follow the most sensationalistic story, and being recently
brainwashed into thinking that the only way to respond to a major terrorist attack was the American way – a war.
Here are four reasons why the Mumbai attacks will not result in a war:
1. For both countries, a war would be a disaster. India has been successfully building stronger relations with
the rest of the world over the last decade. It has occasionally engaged in military muscle-flexing (abetted by a Bush administration eager to promote
India as a counterweight to China and Pakistan), but it has much more aggressively promoted itself as an emerging economic powerhouse and a moral, democratic
alternative to less savory authoritarian regimes. Attacking a fledgling democratic Pakistan
would not improve India’s reputation in
anybody’s eyes.
The restraint Manmohan Singh’s
government has exercised following the attacks indicates a desire to avoid rash and
potentially regrettable actions. It is also perhaps a recognition that military attacks will never end terrorism. Pakistan, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly win a
war against India, and Pakistan’s military defeat would surely lead to the downfall of the new democratic government. The military would regain control, and Islamic
militants would surely make a grab for power – an outcome neither India nor Pakistan want. Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has shown that this is not the path
he wants his country to go down. He has forcefully spoken out against terrorist groups operating in Pakistan and has ordered military attacks against LeT camps. Key
members of LeT and other terrorist groups have been arrested. One can hope that this is only the beginning, despite the unenviable military and political difficulties
in doing so.
2. Since the last major India-Pakistan clash in 1999, both countries have made concrete efforts to create
people-to-people connections and to improve economic relations. Bus and train services between the countries have resumed
for the first time in decades along with an easing of the issuing of visas to cross the border. India-Pakistan cricket matches have resumed, and India has
granted Pakistan “most favored nation” trading status. The Mumbai attacks will undoubtedly strain relations, yet it is hard to believe
that both sides would throw away this recent progress. With the removal of Pervez Musharraf and the election of a democratic government (though a shaky,
relatively weak one), both the Indian government and the Pakistani government have political motivations to ease tensions and to proceed with efforts to improve
relations. There are also growing efforts to recognize and build upon the many cultural ties between the populations of India and Pakistan and a decreasing sense of
animosity between the countries.
3. Both countries also face difficult internal problems that present more of a threat to their stability and
security than does the opposite country. If they are wise, the governments of both countries will work more towards
addressing these internal threats than the less dangerous external ones. The most significant problems facing Pakistan
today do not revolve around the unresolved situation in Kashmir or a military threat posed by India. The more significant threat to Pakistan comes from within.
While LeT has focused its firepower on India instead of the Pakistani state, other militant Islamic outfits have not.
Groups based in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan have orchestrated frequent deadly suicide bombings and clashes with the Pakistani military, including the
attack that killed ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. The battle that the Pakistani government faces now is not against its traditional enemy India, but against
militants bent on destroying the Pakistani state and creating a Taliban-style regime in Pakistan. In order to deal with this threat, it must strengthen the structures of
a democratic, inclusive political system that can also address domestic problems and inequalities. On the other hand, the threat of Pakistani based terrorists to India
is significant. However, suicide bombings and attacks are also carried out by Indian Islamic militants, and vast swaths of rural India are under the de facto control of
the Maoist guerrillas known as the Naxalites. Hindu fundamentalists pose a serious threat to the safety of many Muslim and Christian Indians and to the idea of
India as a diverse, secular, democratic society. Separatist insurgencies in Kashmir and in parts of the northeast have dragged on for years. And like Pakistan, India
faces significant challenges in addressing sharp social and economic inequalities. Additionally, Indian political parties, especially the ruling Congress Party and others
that rely on the support of India’s massive Muslim population to win elections, are certainly wary about inflaming public opinion against Pakistan (and Muslims).
This fear could lead the investigation into the Mumbai attacks to fizzle out with no resolution, as many other such inquiries have.
4. The international attention to this attack – somewhat difficult to explain in my opinion given the general complacency and utter apathy in much
of the western world about previous terrorist attacks in places like India, Pakistan, and Indonesia – is a final obstacle to an armed conflict.
Not only does it put both countries under a microscope in terms of how they respond to the terrible events, it also means
that they will feel international pressure to resolve the situation without resorting to war. India and Pakistan have been
warned by the US, Russia, and others not to let the situation end in war. India has been actively recruiting Pakistan’s closest allies – China and Saudi Arabia – to
pressure Pakistan to act against militants, and the US has been in the forefront of pressing Pakistan for action. Iran too has expressed solidarity with India in the face
of the attacks and is using its regional influence to bring more diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.
1nc Hemp/Enviro
Their internal link claims are exaggerated- no reason hemp can save the world
Mitchell 2013 (Dan; Why legalized hemp will not be a miracle crop; Oct 17;
modernfarmer.com/2013/10/legal-industrial-hemp-wont-matter/; kdf)
There has never been a good reason for the ban on industrial hemp. It's no more harmful than industrial switchgrass, or industrial lumber for
that matter. But at the same time, the
claims of hemp activists are often overblown. It's a highly useful, highly versatile crop,
but its utility is, for the most part, fairly marginal, at least going by the size of its existing markets and estimates for how big a
domestic U.S. market could be. That “activists” have rallied behind hemp is, of course, mainly due to its relationship to marijuana. The plants
are cousins — both are cannabis. Not that hemp should ever have been illegal, but it’s
hard to imagine that if flax or jute were
for some reason illegal, such a large, politically-tinged campaign would be organized around legalizing either
of them. As with any political movement, hemp activism has generated tons of wildly exaggerated claims, such as
when a Daily Kos writer in 2011 declared that “Industrial Hemp can save America.” But good for the activists, since they appear to be winning,
as they should. Several states have formally legalized hemp production, though most of them are waiting for the federal government to come
around, since hemp, incredibly enough, is still classified as a Schedule I narcotic. That means the government considers it among the most
dangerous of illegal drugs and attaches the most severe criminal penalties to it. Even though smoking it would do no more than perhaps give
you a headache. Like marijuana, hemp contains the psychoactive ingredient THC, but in such small amounts it’s almost not measurable in
hemp. Early this month, a farmer in Colorado harvested the first legally produced industrial hemp crop in 56 years. It’s not even quite legal
there, even by state law (regulations governing hemp production are set to go into effect next year), but farmer Ryan Loflin went ahead and
cultivated 55 acres of the stuff, some of which will be processed into oil and sold to Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a major U.S. buyer of hemp.
With states like Colorado and Washington making marijuana legal for recreational use, and many others legalizing medical marijuana, the
nation’s laws and attitudes regarding the cannabis plant are quickly changing. It seems likely that a thriving hemp market will finally develop
here. But “thriving”
doesn’t mean “huge” — not by a longshot. Worldwide, only about 200,000 acres of land were
devoted to hemp cultivation in 2011, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, with that number being “flat
to decreasing” in recent years in the 30 countries where hemp is cultivated. Meanwhile, in North Dakota
alone, flax was harvested from more than 315,000 acres (95 percent of the U.S. crop) in 2012, according to the Agricultural
Marketing Resource Association. For further perspective, consider that corn is planted on about 85 million acres in the U.S. alone every year
(though that might say more about our reliance on corn than it says about hemp.) There are good reasons for this. Chief among them is
demand, which isn’t as high as hemp’s loudest proponents would have it. In
Europe, demand fell through the 20th century
as industrial buyers increasingly chose cheaper or better alternatives for many applications — often artificial
fibers. That phenomenon has been replicated elsewhere. And as more uses for hemp have been found, demand has grown, but not at levels
that would indicate a coming hemp revolution. The crop’s illegality in the United States hasn’t helped either, of course, though imports of
hemp-based products — many of them from China — have been legal since 1998. The total
retail market for hemp in the
United States is only about $500 million. That will no doubt grow with domestic cultivation — and perhaps with innovations in
manufacturing technologies that could increase demand. But hemp is unlikely to ever be a world-changer. Best known
historically for its use to make paper and rope (neither of which are often made with hemp these days, because there are better materials), the
crop’s versatility is its major selling point. It’s used in the manufacture of fabrics, household products, fuels, plastics, construction materials, and
all kinds of other stuff. It has gained some popularity as a food ingredient in recent years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said that “the
market potential for hemp seed as a food ingredient is unknown. However, it probably will remain a small market, like those for sesame and
poppy seeds.” The one big benefit of hemp? Its environmental footprint is relatively small. It requires few pesticides and no herbicides. It’s an
excellent rotation crop, often used to suppress weeds and loosen soil before the planting of winter cereals. On the other hand, it requires a
relatively large amount of water, and its need for deep, humus-rich, nutrient-dense soil limits growing locales. And hemp
cultivation is
highly labor intensive. Loflin, the Colorado farmer, took to social media to recruit 45 people to help him harvest his crop by hand over a
weekend. “Use of a mechanical combine,” the Denver Post reported, “would have harmed the plants’ stalks.” That’s one reason prices are
so high — about six times the cost of wood pulp. Hemp is an annual crop, which means it must be stored in
order to be processed throughout the year, further adding to the cost of using it — and to the incentive for using something
else. Production of hemp varies considerably year to year, but in general, it had been steadily but slowly rising. In 1999, 250 million pounds
were produced, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization; in 2011, it was 280 million. That’s pounds, not tons. The FAO says the
increase is mainly due to rising demand for food, supplements and body-care products made with hemp. Sales of such products are at the
mercy of consumer whims. It would be better news for hemp if industrial uses comprised the main driver of demand. Once hemp becomes
more commonplace, consumers might prefer to just go back to Aveeno lotions and Dreyer’s ice cream. None of which is to say that the outlook
for hemp is not bright. It certainly seems to be, as
long as we keep things in their proper perspective. That means
ignoring claims such as hemp becoming a “trillion-dollar crop” that “could finally allow people to grow
money on trees.”
International competition stymies market viability
Johnson 14—Specialist in Agricultural Policy
(Renee, “Hemp as an Agricultural Commodity”, CRS Report, February 14, 2014, dml)
Other studies focused on the total U.S. market differ from the various state reports and provide a less
favorable aggregate view of the potential market for hemp growers in the United States. Two studies,
conducted by researchers at USDA and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), highlight some of the continued challenges facing U.S. hemp
producers.
For example, USDA’s study projected
that U.S. hemp markets “are, and will likely remain, small, thin markets”
and also cited “uncertainty about long-run demand for hemp products and the potential for oversupply”
among possible downsides of potential future hemp production.
Similarly, the
UW-M study concluded that hemp production “is not likely to generate sizeable profits” and
although hemp may be “slightly more profitable than traditional row crops” it is likely “less profitable
than other specialty crops” due to the “current state of harvesting and processing technologies, which are quite labor
intensive, and result in relatively high per unit costs.”26 The study highlights that U.S. hemp growers could be affected by
competition from other world producers as well as by certain production limitations in the United
States, including yield variability and lack of harvesting innovations and processing facilities in the United
States, as well as difficulty transporting bulk hemp. The study further claims that most estimates of profitability from hemp
production are highly speculative, and often do not include additional costs of growing hemp in a
regulated market, such as the cost associated with “licensing, monitoring, and verification of commercial
hemp.”27
A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Kentucky highlights some of the issues and challenges for that state’s growers,
processors, and industry. The study predicts that in Kentucky, despite “showing some positive returns, under
current market conditions, it does not appear that anticipated hemp returns will be large enough to
entice Kentucky grain growers to shift out of grain production,” under most circumstances; also, “short run
employment opportunities evolving from a new Kentucky hemp industry appear limited (perhaps dozens of
new jobs, not 100s),” because of continued uncertainty in the industry.28 Overall, the study concludes there are many
remaining unknowns and further analysis and production research is needed.
Mexican collapse jacks the dollar
Chase 96 (Robert S. Chase, PhD Candidate – Economics Yale U., Et Al., Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 1996,
Lexis)
What really defines a pivotal states is its capacity to affect regional and international stability. A
pivotal state is so important regionally
that its collapse would spell transboundary mayhem: migration, communal violence, pollution, disease, and so on. A
pivotal state's steady economic progress and stability, on the other hand, would bolster its region's economic vitality and political soundness and benefit American
trade and investment. For the present, the
following should be considered pivotal states: Mexico and Brazil; Algeria, Egypt, and
South Africa; Turkey; India and Pakistan; and Indonesia. These states' prospects vary widely. India's potential for success, for example, is considerably greater than
Algeria's; Egypt's potential for chaos is greater than Brazil's. But all face a precarious future, and their success or failure will powerfully influence the future of the
surrounding areas and affect American interests. This theory of pivotal states must not become a mantra, as the domino theory did, and the list of states could
change. But the concept itself can provide a necessary and useful framework for devising American strategy toward the developing world. A WORLD TURNING ON
PIVOTS TO UNDERSTAND this idea in concrete terms, consider the Mexican crisis a year ago. Mexico's modernization has created strains between the central and
local governments and difficulties with the unions and the poorest groups in the countryside, and it has damaged the environment. Like the other pivotal states,
Mexico is delicately balanced between progress and turmoil. Given the publicity and political debate surrounding the Clinton administration's rescue plan for
Mexico, most Americans probably understood that their southern neighbor is special, even if they were disturbed by the means employed to rescue it. A
collapse of the peso and the consequent ruin of the Mexican economy would have weakened the U.S. dollar, hurt
exports, and caused convulsions throughout Latin America's Southern Cone Common Market and other emerging
markets . Dramatically illustrating the potency of new security threats to the United States, economic devastation in Mexico would have
increased the northward flow of illegal immigrants and further strained the United States' overstretched educational and
social services. Violent social chaos in Mexico could spill over into this country. As many bankers remarked during the peso
crisis, Mexico's troubles demonstrated the impossibility of separating "there" from "here." Because of Mexico's proximity and its
increasing links with the United States, American policymakers clearly needed to give it special attention. As
evidenced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, they have. But other select states also require close American attention.
Nuclear war
Porter 6 (Dave, Director of Business Development-Structures – General Dynamics, “Oregon Steel”, Blue
Oregon, 12-8, http://www.blueoregon.com/2006/12/ff_oregon_steel.html)
There could be a soft landing or a domestic and international disaster. As Clyde Prestowitz in "Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of
Wealth and Power to the East" writes: "The nightmare scenario - an economic 9/11 - is a sudden, massive sell-off of dollars; a world financial
panic whose trigger might be as minor, relatively speaking, as the assassination of a second-rate archduke in a third-rate European city. A
collapse of the dollar and its consequent abandonment as the world's reserve currency would create a deep recession in
the United States. Gas and fuel prices would soar, anything imported would suddenly become much more
expensive, interest rates would jump , as would unemployment. The "stagflation" of the 1970's - slow growth and high
unemployment combined with double-digit interest rates-would look like a walk in the park. And since the United States is at present the
world's only major net importer, all of the exporters that depend on it for their economic stability would
suffer severely as well. It's
the thought of these consequences that make the big dollar holders so nervous, and makes them, for now, hold on to their excess dollars." Our
economy has been totally mismanged and it's scary. And beyond the worldwide economic ruin, international cooperation would break down
I am
particularly concerned about China-US relations during the rest of the 21st century. Both countries
would be under severe stress in such a scenario. Nuclear exchanges would not be impossible. As I have argued in
and wars would erupt. Peoples around the world would be so vulnerable and angry that they would blame and envy their neighbors.
our proposal "Developing the China Connection through Educational Programs," we need to give our children the skills to get through such a
crisis.
A strong relationship is critical in addressing bioterrorism
Armstrong 4 (Anne, Chairman, Executive Committee CSIS Board of Trustees, “U.S.-Mexico Border
Security and the Evolving Security Relationship,” Center for Strategic and International Studies,
http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/0404_bordersecurity.pdf)
The threat of biological terrorism continues to be one of the gravest concerns of U.S. authorities at the national,
state, and local levels. These concerns have led to the perception that there is a potential risk that Al Qaeda or other Islamist terrorist groups could
attempt to exploit the long and porous U.S.-Mexican border to infiltrate terrorists and biological weapons
of mass destruction into the U nited S tates. The relative ease with which illegal immigrants and illicit drugs
are transported into the United States from and through Mexico, and the wealth, skills, and experience of trafficking organizations,
indicates that the threat of biological terrorism through Mexico deserves sustained and serious
attention . Moreover, the threat can only be addressed seriously through extensive and increased collaboration by intelligence and law enforcement
agencies on both sides of the border.
2NC CP
Regional containment solves, even with rivals
Hadar, foreign policy studies – Cato, 7/1/11 (Leon, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13259)
To some extent, the recognition that the United States has lost some of its ability to determine strategic outcomes in the Middle East has already encouraged
regional powers to reassess the wisdom of free riding on American power. Saudi Arabia, together with its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has
deployed troops to Bahrain to provide support to the regime and is heading the efforts to stabilize Yemen. Meanwhile,
France, a major Mediterranean power, and Britain have played a leading role in the military operation in Libya to protect
their interests in the region. Turkey has been asserting more forcefully its role as a regional power in multiple ways.
Indeed, contrary
to the warning proponents of U.S. military intervention typically express, the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan would
not necessarily lead to more chaos and bloodshed in those countries. Russia, India and Iran — which supported the
Northern Alliance that helped Washintgon topple the Taliban — and Pakistan (which once backed the Taliban) all have close ties to various
ethnic and tribal groups in that country and now have a common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan and containing the
rivalries.
A similar arrangement could be applied to Iraq where Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and Iran share an interest in assisting their local allies
and in restraining potential rivals — Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Turkmen — by preventing the sectarian tensions in Iraq
from spilling into the rest of the region.
Hence, Turkey
has already been quite successful in stabilizing and developing economic ties with the autonomous Kurdish area of
Iraq while containing irredentist Kurdish pressures in northern Iraq and southern Turkey and protecting the Turkmen minority. And Turkey, together with Saudi
Arabia and Iran, has played a critical role toward forming a government in Baghdad that recognizes the interests of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.
Low probability of bioterror
Pearson ‘4 (Alan, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington DC, The
Problem of Biological Weapons, Book Review by Milton Leitenberg, http://www.issues.org/21.3/br_pearson.html)
“The age of bioterrorism is now,” the Washington Post said in January 2005. Many politicians, policymakers, and scientists agree, and so billions of dollars are being
spent on biodefense R&D. A dramatic increase in classified threat-assessment research is imminent, including the exploration of potential new bioweapons agents
and technologies. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says that bioterrorism is “the greatest existential threat we have in the world today” and calls for a biodefense
R&D effort that “even dwarfs the Manhattan Project.” Many others agree. Milton Leitenberg does not agree. He believes
that the threat of
catastrophic bioterrorism has been grossly and irresponsibly exaggerated. He says that faulty threat
assessments are legion, that the bioweapons problem is larger and more complex than the focus on
bioterrorism suggests, and that current U.S. policies are making the problem worse. Leitenberg, a senior research scholar at the University of
Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, is a bioweapons and arms control expert with nearly 40 years of
experience. In his provocative new book, The Problem of Biological Weapons, he presents what he considers a more reasoned,
comprehensive, and evidence-based assessment of the bioweapons threat. Focusing on events of the
past 15 years, Leitenberg examines national bioweapons programs, bioterrorism, international efforts to
bring bioweapons under control, and current U.S. policies and activities. He concludes that the primary threat today is not
bioterrorism but rather the proliferation of bioweapons programs among states. Widespread U.S. concern about bioterrorism first emerged in 1995 after the Aum
Shinrikyo cult released sarin (a chemical nerve agent) in the Tokyo subway system and was then found to have made earlier, unsuccessful attempts to use
bioweapons. Nonetheless, a dramatic increase in biodefense funding didn’t occur until after the 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated that some terrorists were
willing to kill unlimited numbers of people. The anthrax attacks that followed shortly thereafter sealed the case for the biodefense R&D boom. Leitenberg
agrees that terrorists are interested in bioweapons, but he concludes from a detailed review of the
evidence that there is little or no trend indicating that terrorist capabilities are improving. Whereas others see
Aum Shinrikyo as demonstrating the ease with which nonstate actors could develop and use bioweapons, Leitenberg sees the opposite: a group
incapable of mounting a successful bioweapons attack despite significant interest and major effort. He
says that al Qaeda remains far behind Aum in its capabilities. Finally, he notes that the U.S. government maintains that
someone closely connected to the U.S. biodefense program probably perpetrated the 2001 anthrax
attacks. As for damage assessments, Leitenberg says that those used in recent planning exercises are
unreasonable and reflect only the most extreme and least likely consequences of worst-case scenarios.
His conclusion is clearly stated: “A terrorist use of a BW agent is best characterized as an event of
extremely low probability, which might—depending on the agent, its quality and its means of dispersion—produce high mortality.”
No extinction from bioweapons
O’Neill 04 – (Brendan, 8-19 “Weapons of Minimum Destruction” http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA694.htm)
David C Rapoport, professor
of political science at University of California, Los Angeles and editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political
Violence, has examined what he calls 'easily available evidence' relating to the historic use of chemical and biological
weapons. He found something surprising - such weapons do not cause mass destruction. Indeed, whether used by states, terror
groups or dispersed in industrial accidents, they tend to be far less destructive than conventional weapons. 'If we
stopped speculating about things that might happen in the future and looked instead at what has
happened in the past, we'd see that our fears about WMD are misplaced', he says. Yet such fears remain widespread.
Post-9/11, American and British leaders have issued dire warnings about terrorists getting hold of WMD and causing mass murder and mayhem. President George
W Bush has spoken of terrorists who, 'if they ever gained weapons of mass destruction', would 'kill hundreds of thousands, without hesitation and without mercy'
(1). The British government has spent £28million on stockpiling millions of smallpox vaccines, even though there's no evidence that terrorists have got access to
smallpox, which was eradicated as a natural disease in the 1970s and now exists only in two high-security labs in America and Russia (2). In 2002, British nurses
became the first in the world to get training in how to deal with the victims of bioterrorism (3). The UK Home Office's 22-page pamphlet on how to survive a terror
attack, published last month, included tips on what to do in the event of a 'chemical, biological or radiological attack' ('Move away from the immediate source of
danger', it usefully advised). Spine-chilling books such as Plague Wars: A True Story of Biological Warfare, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats From Weapons of
Mass Destruction and The Survival Guide: What to Do in a Biological, Chemical or Nuclear Emergency speculate over what kind of horrors WMD might wreak. TV
docudramas, meanwhile, explore how Britain might cope with a smallpox assault and what would happen if London were 'dirty nuked' (4). The term 'weapons of
mass destruction' refers to three types of weapons: nuclear, chemical and biological. A chemical weapon is any weapon that uses a manufactured chemical, such as
sarin, mustard gas or hydrogen cyanide, to kill or injure. A biological weapon uses bacteria or viruses, such as smallpox or anthrax, to cause destruction - inducing
sickness and disease as a means of undermining enemy forces or inflicting civilian casualties. We find such weapons repulsive, because of the horrible way in which
the victims convulse and die - but they appear to be less 'destructive' than conventional weapons. 'We know that nukes are massively destructive, there is a lot of
evidence for that', says Rapoport. But when
it comes to chemical and biological weapons, 'the evidence suggests that
we should call them "weapons of minimum destruction", not mass destruction', he says. Chemical weapons have most commonly
been used by states, in military warfare. Rapoport explored various state uses of chemicals over the past hundred years: both sides used them in the First World
War; Italy deployed chemicals against the Ethiopians in the 1930s; the Japanese used chemicals against the Chinese in the 1930s and again in the Second World
War; Egypt and Libya used them in the Yemen and Chad in the postwar period; most recently, Saddam Hussein's Iraq used chemical weapons, first in the war
against Iran (1980-1988) and then against its own Kurdish population at the tail-end of the Iran-Iraq war. In each instance, says Rapoport, chemical weapons were
used more in desperation than from a position of strength or a desire to cause mass destruction. 'The evidence is that states rarely use them even when they have
them', he has written. 'Only when a military stalemate has developed, which belligerents who have become desperate want to break, are they used.' (5) As to
whether such use of chemicals was effective, Rapoport says that at best it blunted an offensive - but this very rarely, if ever, translated into a decisive strategic shift
in the war, because the original stalemate continued after the chemical weapons had been deployed. He points to the example of Iraq. The Baathists used
chemicals against Iran when that nasty trench-fought war had reached yet another stalemate. As Efraim Karsh argues in his paper 'The Iran-Iraq War: A Military
Analysis': 'Iraq employed [chemical weapons] only in vital segments of the front and only when it saw no other way to check Iranian offensives. Chemical weapons
had a negligible impact on the war, limited to tactical rather than strategic [effects].' (6) According to Rapoport, this 'negligible' impact of chemical weapons on the
direction of a war is reflected in the disparity between the numbers of casualties caused by chemicals and the numbers caused by conventional weapons. It is
estimated that the use of gas in the Iran-Iraq war killed 5,000 - but the Iranian side suffered around 600,000 dead in total, meaning that gas killed less than one per
cent. The deadliest use of gas occurred in the First World War but, as Rapoport points out, it still only accounted for five per cent of casualties. Studying the amount
of gas used by both sides from1914-1918 relative to the number of fatalities gas caused, Rapoport has written: 'It took a ton of gas in that war to achieve a single
enemy fatality. Wind and sun regularly dissipated the lethality of the gases. Furthermore, those gassed were 10 to 12 times as likely to recover than those casualties
produced by traditional weapons.' (7) Indeed, Rapoport discovered that some earlier documenters of the First World War had a vastly different assessment of
chemical weapons than we have today - they considered the use of such weapons to be preferable to bombs and guns, because chemicals caused fewer fatalities.
One wrote: 'Instead of being the most horrible form of warfare, it is the most humane, because it disables far more than it kills, ie, it has a low fatality ratio.' (8)
'Imagine that', says Rapoport, 'WMD being referred to as more humane'. He says that the contrast between such assessments and today's fears shows that actually
looking at the evidence has benefits, allowing 'you to see things more rationally'. According to Rapoport, even Saddam's use of gas against the Kurds of Halabja in
1988 - the most recent use by a state of chemical weapons and the most commonly cited as evidence of the dangers of 'rogue states' getting their hands on WMD does not show that unconventional weapons are more destructive than conventional ones. Of course the attack on Halabja was horrific, but he points out that the
circumstances surrounding the assault remain unclear. 'The estimates of how many were killed vary greatly', he tells me. 'Some say 400, others say 5,000, others
say more than 5,000. The fighter planes that attacked the civilians used conventional as well as unconventional weapons; I have seen no study which explores how
many were killed by chemicals and how many were killed by firepower. We all find these attacks repulsive, but the death toll may actually have been greater if
terrorist use of chemical
and biological weapons is similar to state use - in that it is rare and, in terms of causing mass destruction, not
very effective. He cites the work of journalist and author John Parachini, who says that over the past 25 years only four significant
attempts by terrorists to use WMD have been recorded. The most effective WMD-attack by a non-state group, from a
military perspective, was carried out by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka in 1990. They used chlorine gas against Sri Lankan soldiers
guarding a fort, injuring over 60 soldiers but killing none. The Tamil Tigers' use of chemicals angered their support base, when some
of the chlorine drifted back into Tamil territory - confirming Rapoport's view that one problem with using unpredictable and unwieldy
chemical and biological weapons over conventional weapons is that the cost can be as great 'to the attacker as to the attacked'.
conventional bombs only were used. We know that conventional weapons can be more destructive.' Rapoport says that
The Tigers have not used WMD since.
Deployment of bioweapons dramatically reduces their death toll.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for
International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from
the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from
Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
Properly developed and deployed, biological weapons could potentially, if thus far only in theory, kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people. The
discussion remains theoretical because biological weapons have scarcely ever been used. For the most
destructive results, they need to be dispersed in very low-altitude aerosol clouds. Since aerosols do not
appreciably settle, pathogens like anthrax (which is not easy to spread or catch and is not contagious)
would probably have to be sprayed near nose level. Moreover, 90 percent of the microorganisms are
likely to die during the process of aerosolization, while their effectiveness could be reduced still further
by sunlight, smog, humidity, and temperature changes. Explosive methods of dispersion may destroy
the organisms, and, except for anthrax spores, long-term storage of lethal organisms in bombs or
warheads is difficult: even if refrigerated, most of the organisms have a limited lifetime. Such weapons
can take days or weeks to have full effect, during which time they can be countered with medical and
civil defense measures. In the summary judgment of two careful analysts, delivering microbes and toxins
over a wide area in the form most suitable for inflicting mass casualties-as an aerosol that could be
inhaled-requires a delivery system of enormous sophistication, and even then effective dispersal could
easily be disrupted by unfavorable environmental and meteorological conditions
2NC FEDERALISM
Cooperative federalism is resilient
Greve 2K (Michael, John G. Searle Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Ph.D.
(Government) Cornell University, 1987, “Against Cooperative Federalism” Mississippi Law
Journal, 70 Miss. L.J. 557, Lexis)
Cooperative federalism is enormously resilient and, moreover, self-stabilizing. The range of
conflict within the system is defined by the participant-beneficiaries' fight over the terms of
cooperation. State and local governments will complain about unfunded mandates and federal
imposition; national interest groups and their congressional patrons will complain about state
shirking and non-compliance.Furor over unfunded mandates produces more money and less
onerous federal conditions; interest group complaints over the states' failure to use federal block
grants for their intended purposes leads to the re-categorization of federal
programs. n150 Either way, the system returns to its bargaining equilibrium, typically at a
higher level of aggregate spending.
Under ordinary political conditions, cooperative arrangements are virtually immune to
political reform. In Germany and in the United States, cooperative federalism came under
challenge during periods of serious economic malaise and manifest civic alienation, coupled
with exogenous shocks (re-unification and European integration in Germany's case, and the
ascent of a determined, ideological administration in the United States). The record strongly
suggests that cooperative federalism is impregnable even under those disadvantageous
conditions.
AT: COMPETITIVENESS IMPACT
Spending is irrelevant – culture garuntees competitiveness
Segal 11 – senior fellow at CFR,—Ira A. Lipman senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security studies at the Council
on Foreign Relations (Adam, 27 July 2011, “The Great Invention Race,”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/27/the_great_invention_race,RBatra)
U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to "win the future" by out-innovating the rest of the world was a ringing climax of his State of the Union address this week. Obama
what will really
determine U.S. competitiveness in the global ideas market isn't the money we can pour into the
system. It's the strength of the system itself -- the social, political, and cultural institutions that shape
ideas from start to finish.
suggested increasing U.S. investment in research and development, a good and welcome step. But
There is no doubt that China and India are catching up with the United States when it comes
to hardware -- the raw materials for innovation. They are increasing their spending on science and technology, training more engineers
and scientists, applying for more patents, and churning out more research papers.
But the actual system for generating useful ideas in these places remains
underdeveloped. Yes, more scientists are being trained, but that doesn't mean they're
producing good science.Plagiarism and data fraud are rampant. In a survey of 180 graduates with doctorates quoted in
China Daily, 60 percent admitted to paying for their work to be published in academic journals. Sixty
percent also said that they had copied someone else's work. Even as a large number of Chinese and Indian
scientific stars have returned to their native countries from abroad, they have been unable to
transform a research culture characterized by strong bureaucratic control and deference toward
age and seniority. In the words of Anita Mehta, a physicist at the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in India, "Diversity of research or personality is
often frowned upon, those who don't match stereotypes or work on subjects that have been hammered to death are labelled 'too independent.'"
government incentives, especially in China, are
focused on making Chinese versions of international products such as cell phones and semiconductors rather than
on sparking bold, local innovation. In both countries, new companies must maneuver through an opaque legal system, unpredictable regulations,
and volatile capital markets. And though policymakers in Beijing and Delhi are aware of these challenges, addressing
them will require political and social change, and so progress will be slow and uneven.
In the Indian and Chinese private sectors, there are very real bursts of entrepreneurial activity. But
America can't win the hardware race. There are simply too many people -- 2.3 billion people in India and China -- for the United States to compete when it comes to materials
and labor. Given respective population size, China and India will one day have more skilled engineers than the United States, even if their quality doesn't match up now. Total
U.S. spending on R&D ($395 billion in 2010) is currently more than two and a half times larger than Chinese expenditures ($141 billion), but that gap is rapidly shrinking.
But America can compete when it comes to software -- i.e., the ideas and innovation that are still out of reach for China's and India's more hidebound scientific and business
communities. An important first step will be helping small start-ups. Small companies (those with fewer than 500 employees) generate about half of total employment in the
United States; according to the Small Business Technology Council, they also employ more scientists and engineers than do large businesses and more than universities and
federal labs combined. Specifically, as a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation shows, new small businesses are the ones creating these jobs. Since 1980 nearly all net job
creation in the United States occurred in firms less than five years old; over the last four years, these young start-ups created two-thirds of all new jobs.
To help small businesses, the U.S. government needs what William Miller, former vice president and provost of Stanford University and a venture capitalist, describes as "people
and place" policies -- policies that support research, training, and collaboration. The Clinic Program at Harvey Mudd College, for example, involves students in solving realworld problems that have immediate commercial or scientific applications. The locus of innovation isn't in individual entities anymore -- universities, for example, or corporate
labs -- but in broader ecosystems that combine these more traditional bodies with smaller networked groups. Another transformative example is in Maine, where the North Star
Alliance Initiative -- a partnership involving small companies, the University of Maine, community colleges, and the state government -- is leveraging local research to spur the
development of a wide range of other industries, including marine and waterfront infrastructure and ballistic armor.
unfortunately, the dominant U.S. policy response to this
perceived global competition has been a single-minded focus on increasing the absolute number
of scientists. Instead, the United States must think more broadly about the range of skills a scientist develops. Many future breakthroughs are likely to emerge from
A more holistic model of education will also be crucial. So far,
multidisciplinary work at the nexus of biology, physics, computer science, and mathematics. As a result, young entrepreneurs must be familiar with several different branches of
the sciences, as well as be able to draw insights from design, psychology, economics, and anthropology.
Finally, the United States still retains the immense advantage of its connections with global innovation networks. A vast web of collaborative research, corporate alliances,
foundation grants, personal ties, alumni groups, and government-to-government contacts tie the United States to established and emerging centers of scientific excellence. In
2005, for example, scientists in the United States were the most popular partners for Chinese and Japanese scientists in every field -- chemistry, physics, engineering,
environmental technology, and biology -- but one: material science. And in that field, they were the second most popular choice for both their Japanese and their Chinese
colleagues.
The goal, then, is to make sure the United States does not become complacent about these relationships. As the president noted in his State of the Union address, the United
States must improve visa regulations, welcome highly skilled immigrants, and create clear paths to citizenship. Those who excel in school or start their own businesses should be
encouraged to stay in the United States. At the same time, the United States will have to do more to reach out into the world. The National Science Foundation, the Department
of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health, for example, should develop programs that provide more international experiences for U.S. scientists -- and not just short trips,
but extended sojourns in foreign labs.
Inevitably, more science and scientific discovery will occur abroad in the coming years. But as long as the
United States maintains its comparative advantage -- an open and flexible culture and a web of institutions, attitudes,
and relationships that move ideas from the lab to the marketplace -- there's no reason why the future isn't in its grasp .
Instability Inev
— it’s inevitable but empirically doesn’t escalate
Finel, 9 (Dr. Bernard I. Finel, Atlantic Council contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the
American Security Project, “Afghanistan is Irrelevant,” Apr 27
http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/afghanistan-irrelevant)
It is now a deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that the decision to “abandon” Afghanistan after the Cold War was a tragic
mistake. In the oft-told story, our “abandonment” led to civil war, state collapse, the rise of the Taliban, and inevitably terrorist
attacks on American soil.This
narrative is now reinforced by dire warnings about the risks to Pakistan from instability in
Afghanistan. Taken all together, critics of the Afghan commitment now find themselves facing a nearly unshakable consensus in
continuing and deepen our involvement in Afghanistan. The problem with the consensus is that virtually every part of it is wrong.
Abandonment did not cause the collapse of the state. Failed states are not always a threat to U.S.
national security. And Pakistan’s problems have little to do with the situation across the border. First, the collapse of the
Afghan state after the Soviet withdrawal had little to do with Western
abandonment. Afghanistan has always been beset by powerful centrifugal forces. The country is
poor, the terrain rough, the population divided into several ethnic groups. Because of this, the
country has rarely been unified even nominally and has never really had a strong central government. The
dominant historical political system in Afghan is warlordism. This is not a consequence of Western involvement or lack thereof. It
is a function of geography, economics, and demography. Second, there is no straight-line between state failure
and threats to the United States. Indeed, the problem with Afghanistan was not that it failed but rather that
it “unfailed” and becameruled by the Taliban. Congo/Zaire is a failed state. Somalia is a failed state. There
are many parts of the globe that are essentiallyungoverned. Clearly criminality, human rights abuses, and other global
ills flourish in these spaces. But the notion that any and all ungoverned space represents a core national
security threat to the United States is simply unsustainable. Third, the problem was the Taliban regime was not that it
existed. It was that it was allowed to fester without any significant response or intervention. We largely sought to ignore the regime
— refusing to recognize it despite its control of 90% of Afghan territory. Aside from occasional tut-tutting about human rights
violations and destruction of cultural sites, the only real interaction the United States sought with the regime was in trying to control
drugs. Counter-drug initiatives are not a sound foundation for a productive relationship for reasons too numerous to enumerate
here. Had we recognized the Taliban and sought to engage the regime, it is possible that we could have managed to communicate red
lines to them over a period of years. Their failure to turn over bin Laden immediately after 9/11 does not
necessarily imply an absolute inability to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda over
time. Fourth, we are now told that defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan is imperative in order to
help stabilize Pakistan. But, most observers seem to think that Pakistan is in worse shape now —
with the Taliban out of power and American forces in Afghanistan — than it was when the
Taliban was dominant in Afghanistan. For five years from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and the
Islamist threat to Pakistan then was unquestionably lower. This is not surprising actually. Insurgencies are at their most dangerous
— in terms of threat of contagion — when they are fighting for power. The number of insurgencies that actually manage
to sponsor
insurgencies elsewhere after taking power is surprising low. The domino theory
is as dubious in the case of Islamist movements as it was in the case of Communist expansion. There is a notion that “everything
changed on 9/11.” We are backing away as a nation from that concept in the case of torture. Perhaps we should also come to realize
that our pre-9/11 assessment of the strategic value and importance of Afghanistan was closer to the mark that our current obsession
with it. We clearly made some mistakes in dealing with the Taliban regime. But addressing those mistakes through better
intelligence, use of special forces raids, and, yes, diplomacy is likely a better solution than trying to build and sustain a reliable, proWestern government in Kabul with control over the entire country.
Afghanistan remains instable despite the plan because the
government is weak
Siddique 2014 (Abubakar; Afghanistan's Future Lies In Finding Solutions To Past
Problems; Aug 8; gandhara.rferl.org/content/article/26520370.html; kdf)
The strength of Afghan government institutions will be crucial to prevent a Taliban
comeback after the departure of most Western troops later this year. Kabul will also need to
secure continued access to the international support it has attracted since 2001. Years, and perhaps
decades, of international funding will be required to sustain the nearly 400,000-strong Afghan
security forces. The Afghan government currently lacks domestic revenues to fund these forces. The
unraveling of Iraq should give Washington an incentive to invest in Afghan forces, with or without
ratification of the Bilateral Security Agreement aimed at cementing Kabul's long-term strategic alliance with the West. To promote
domestic stability, the Afghan government must clearly define the roles of the army, police and
intelligence service. It is critical for ordinary Afghans to view these organs as their national security establishment, not
private forces loyal to strongmen and former warring factions. The incoming government will also be challenged to deliver good
governance by implementing genuine reforms and abandoning deal-making and patronage. This will be hard and should be seen as
a long-term prospect. Kabul cannot be expected to rapidly weaken key power brokers who run mafia-like political organizations and
patronage networks. The government needs to quickly bridge the rural-urban divide by ensuring that
reforms enacted in Kabul make their way to remote valleys and villages. The government will also have to
quickly reform the judiciary to win the trust of citizens who continue to suffer from local conflicts and feuds after decades of war.
Afghanistan's internal transformation, however, will not be complete without a corresponding realignment in the country's relations
with regional powers. For a generation, all of Afghanistan's neighbors have paid heavily for Afghan instability. These powers now
must help Afghanistan achieve its goal of becoming an "Asian Roundabout" between the subcontinent, China, West Asia and Central
Asia. Beijing and New Delhi have seen the potential benefits and have been pursuing plans to invest billions of dollars in
Afghanistan's vast untapped mineral reserves. Together with Washington and its European allies, they need to step up to a more
proactive stabilizing role. Pakistan, in particular, will benefit from such a transformation in Afghanistan. But
Islamabad would be wise to seek a genuine settlement with Afghanistan by abandoning efforts to install a pro-Pakistan "friendly"
government in Kabul. Pakistan should instead work towards building a shared economic future with
its neighbor. Islamabad and New Delhi each stand to gain by halting their competition for political influence in Kabul and
pursuing regional economic integration. Economic co-operation will prove to be the most effective antidote to poverty, conflicts and
insecurity in South Asia and Central Asia. As the foreign combat mission in Afghanistan winds down, Washington and its
allies need to help Afghan leaders preserve the fragile gains of the past decade and build a strong
state capable of withstanding the inevitable challenges. For their part, Afghan leaders, whether in opposition or
in the government, need to be vigilant to ensure that their country's future will not be a prolongation of its troubled past.
AT: India
No war—mutual interest and pressure for restraint
Mutti 9 – over a decade of expertise covering on South Asia geopolitics, Contributing Editor to
Demockracy journal (James, 1/5, Mumbai Misperceptions: War is Not Imminent,
http://demockracy.com/four-reasons-why-the-mumbai-attacks-wont-result-in-a-nuclear-war/)
Writer Amitav Ghosh divined a crucial connection between the two messages. “When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11, they are in effect pushing the
Indian government to mount a comparable response.” Indeed, India’s opposition Hindu nationalist BJP has blustered, “Our response must be close to what the
American response was.” Fearful
of imminent war, the media has indulged in frantic hand wringing about Indian
and Pakistani nuclear arsenals and renewed fears about the Indian subcontinent being “the most dangerous place on earth.”
As an observer of the subcontinent for over a decade, I am optimistic that war will not be the end result of this event. As horrifying as the Mumbai attacks were,
they are not likely to drive India and Pakistan into an armed international conflict. The media frenzy over an imminent nuclear war seems the result of the media
being superficially knowledgeable about the history of Indian-Pakistani relations, of feeling compelled to follow the most sensationalistic story, and being recently
brainwashed into thinking that the only way to respond to a major terrorist attack was the American way – a war.
Here are four reasons why the Mumbai attacks will not result in a war:
1. For both countries, a war would be a disaster. India has been successfully building stronger relations with
the rest of the world over the last decade. It has occasionally engaged in military muscle-flexing (abetted by a Bush administration eager to promote
India as a counterweight to China and Pakistan), but it has much more aggressively promoted itself as an emerging economic powerhouse and a moral, democratic
alternative to less savory authoritarian regimes. Attacking a fledgling democratic Pakistan
would not improve India’s reputation in
anybody’s eyes.
The restraint Manmohan Singh’s
government has exercised following the attacks indicates a desire to avoid rash and
potentially regrettable actions. It is also perhaps a recognition that military attacks will never end terrorism. Pakistan, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly win a
war against India, and Pakistan’s military defeat would surely lead to the downfall of the new democratic government. The military would regain control, and Islamic
militants would surely make a grab for power – an outcome neither India nor Pakistan want. Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has shown that this is not the path
he wants his country to go down. He has forcefully spoken out against terrorist groups operating in Pakistan and has ordered military attacks against LeT camps. Key
members of LeT and other terrorist groups have been arrested. One can hope that this is only the beginning, despite the unenviable military and political difficulties
in doing so.
2. Since the last major India-Pakistan clash in 1999, both countries have made concrete efforts to create
people-to-people connections and to improve economic relations. Bus and train services between the countries have resumed
for the first time in decades along with an easing of the issuing of visas to cross the border. India-Pakistan cricket matches have resumed, and India has
granted Pakistan “most favored nation” trading status. The Mumbai attacks will undoubtedly strain relations, yet it is hard to believe
that both sides would throw away this recent progress. With the removal of Pervez Musharraf and the election of a democratic government (though a shaky,
relatively weak one), both the Indian government and the Pakistani government have political motivations to ease tensions and to proceed with efforts to improve
relations. There are also growing efforts to recognize and build upon the many cultural ties between the populations of India and Pakistan and a decreasing sense of
animosity between the countries.
3. Both countries also face difficult internal problems that present more of a threat to their stability and
security than does the opposite country. If they are wise, the governments of both countries will work more towards
addressing these internal threats than the less dangerous external ones. The most significant problems facing Pakistan
today do not revolve around the unresolved situation in Kashmir or a military threat posed by India. The more significant threat to Pakistan comes from within.
While LeT has focused its firepower on India instead of the Pakistani state, other militant Islamic outfits have not.
Groups based in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan have orchestrated frequent deadly suicide bombings and clashes with the Pakistani military, including the
attack that killed ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. The battle that the Pakistani government faces now is not against its traditional enemy India, but against
militants bent on destroying the Pakistani state and creating a Taliban-style regime in Pakistan. In order to deal with this threat, it must strengthen the structures of
a democratic, inclusive political system that can also address domestic problems and inequalities. On the other hand, the threat of Pakistani based terrorists to India
is significant. However, suicide bombings and attacks are also carried out by Indian Islamic militants, and vast swaths of rural India are under the de facto control of
the Maoist guerrillas known as the Naxalites. Hindu fundamentalists pose a serious threat to the safety of many Muslim and Christian Indians and to the idea of
India as a diverse, secular, democratic society. Separatist insurgencies in Kashmir and in parts of the northeast have dragged on for years. And like Pakistan, India
faces significant challenges in addressing sharp social and economic inequalities. Additionally, Indian political parties, especially the ruling Congress Party and others
that rely on the support of India’s massive Muslim population to win elections, are certainly wary about inflaming public opinion against Pakistan (and Muslims).
This fear could lead the investigation into the Mumbai attacks to fizzle out with no resolution, as many other such inquiries have.
4. The international attention to this attack – somewhat difficult to explain in my opinion given the general complacency and utter apathy in much
of the western world about previous terrorist attacks in places like India, Pakistan, and Indonesia – is a final obstacle to an armed conflict.
Not only does it put both countries under a microscope in terms of how they respond to the terrible events, it also means
that they will feel international pressure to resolve the situation without resorting to war. India and Pakistan have been
warned by the US, Russia, and others not to let the situation end in war. India has been actively recruiting Pakistan’s closest allies – China and Saudi Arabia – to
pressure Pakistan to act against militants, and the US has been in the forefront of pressing Pakistan for action. Iran too has expressed solidarity with India in the face
of the attacks and is using its regional influence to bring more diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.
Enviro Advantage
The paragraph after their Siegel card ends indicates that hydroponics are flourishing
now-AND- that hydroponics solving is a pipedream
Siegel 13
Erin, Dirt-Free Farming: Will Hydroponics (Finally) Take Off?, June
18, http://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dirt-free-farming-will-hydroponics-finally-take-off/
…While a majority of research funding at universities went towards conventional agricultural methods,
investments in the retail hydroponic industry — spurred, in no small part, by marijuana growers —
were left to drive the development of the technology through the 1970s.
Their card ends
Now that vegetable gardeners are adopting hydroponics for more “legitimate” industries, new
hydroponic shops like Moce’s are trying to shed the associations with the black market. Signs that read,
“Any talk of illegal substances and you will be asked to leave immediately,” line the walls of his shop, but
many potential customers still ask about growing marijuana. “I don’t care who cultivates what,” Moce
says. “A plant is a plant. But it’s frustrating, you know? I tell them, ‘Hey bro, that’s just one plant out of
the thousands that you can grow.’” Moce says that today people grow vegetables hydroponically for
many different reasons. Hydroponics allows people to grow plants much more densely than
conventional agriculture allows, so a lot of Moce’s customers are hobbyists who live in small houses
without sufficient land for a conventional vegetable garden. The public’s expanding concern with the
environment and carbon emissions means Americans want to grow food locally and in new places. “We
already split the atom and have gone to the moon. We can put a pepper in an apartment building,” says
Moce. Pipe Dreams? Yohannes’s hope is that vertical farming could supply fresh, local produce to innercity communities. “We’re trying to feed people because it’s going to be a real problem that we’re going
to face within our lifetimes,” says Yohannes. “This is just a way of combating that in the most efficient
and sustainable way possible.” But not everyone is convinced. Melissa Brechner, the director of Cornell
University’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Hydroponic Technology Transfer Center, thinks that
Yohannes’s dreams of vertical farming are far-fetched, at best. “People are saying that we want to bring
healthy food to inner city people, but the real problem with inner cities is that healthy food costs a lot of
money.” Brechner pointed out that Yohannes needs to sell his produce at a premium in order to
maintain profitability, but this prevents the people he wants to feed from purchasing it. According to
Brechner, an urban hydroponic grower will always pay more than a conventional field-grower because
he has to pay for the sun. “Plants grow in direct proportion to light. So if you give them more light, then
you’re going to improve your yield,” Brechner says. Brechner points to the work of her former colleague
at Cornell, Louis Albright. Taking into account the lighting and the heating of an enclosed warehouse or
skyscraper, Albright calculated that it takes nearly three times as many kilowatt hours to grow a head of
lettuce vertically as it does to grow it in a glass greenhouse outside of the city. Even when factoring the
carbon cost of shipping lettuce en masse, he has found that it is still more environmentally friendly to
grow lettuce away from urban centers. Albright also found that wheat, one of America’s most consumed
crops, is not genetically suited for hydroponic production. He calculated that it currently costs $23 worth
of electricity to produce enough wheat for one loaf of bread in an enclosed warehouse. Brechner
highlights another major vulnerability with large-scale hydroponic production. A power outage will stop
the circulation of the nutrient solution. With most systems, this could destroy a whole season’s worth of
crops in a short time. From Brechner’s perspective, hydroponic technology has not progressed
significantly since Gericke’s time. As long as hydroponic systems cost more money and require more
resources than conventional growing techniques, Brechner remains opposed to hydroponic farming. “I
understand the value of making healthy plants more visible to residents,” she says. “But the sheer
amount of energy that it takes to grow things in the warehouse — we would say in our more passionate
moments that it’s environmentally irresponsible.”
Hydroponics are already outpacing demand
PR Newswire 2014 (Growth in the Hydroponics Food Industry Set to Outpace Global Markets by
80%; Jan 21; www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/growth-in-the-hydroponics-food-industry-set-tooutpace-global-markets-by-80-241264701.html; kdf)
The hydroponic food production industry is expanding at a rate that is set to outpace the 2014 IMF
estimate of global growth by 80%. Hydroponics systems are being deployed to grow key vegetable and fruit crops at scale, driving
the transition to safe and sustainable food production worldwide. Agriculture is traditionally a conservative market sector, but the benefits of
higher yields with lower inputs, improved soil and water quality, and food safety are compelling forces for change. The
worldwide
market value of hydroponically produced food will show sustained strength with a 6.5% compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) over the five-year forecast period 2013-2018, beating the IMF estimated growth forecast of
3.6% for 2014. Producer value will increase from $17.7 billion to $24.3 billion. Growth will be steady thanks to the
buffering effect of mature European markets, but there will be acceleration over the period due to emerging growth in North America and
Eastern Europe.
The only warrant in their Kennedy evidence is that legalization leads to LED
innovation—their evidence is old and doesn’t account for recent growth
Wang Sep 10 (Ucilia; How LEDs are going to change the way we look at cities;
www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2014/09/10/bright-lights-big-profits/; kdf)
The technology at the center of the shift is the LED, or light-emitting diode. LEDs are a break from the history of illumination. As solid-state
semiconductors, they’re more akin to the processor in your smartphone than the lamp overhead. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Shanghai,
Copenhagen and scores of other cities around the world are deploying LEDs in an attempt to solve most, if not all, of the problems created by
inefficient traditional lamps. LEDs cost three to four times more up front than traditional high-pressure streetlamps, but they last three to four
times longer and produce two to three times more light per watt, delivering anywhere from 30% to 70% in annual electricity savings. Because
they are digital chips, they will only get cheaper as the efficiencies of Moore’s Law roll on. And as electronic components they’re also far more
programmable and connect more efficiently with radio and sensor chips to create citywide wireless networks to monitor crime, power outages
and water main breaks and coordinate disaster relief. The
business opportunity in the great LED retrofit is enormous. Of
2020 LEDs are
expected to account for 100 million of the installed base of 155 million streetlights. Annual sales of LED
streetlights will jump from $4.3 billion to $10.2 billion in the same time period. Boston, Seattle and New York City are all
the 140 million streetlights installed worldwide last year, only 19 million were LEDs, according to IHS Technology. By
undertaking big retrofits. New York’s $76 million project will be the largest in the country: replacing 250,000 lights by 2017. City officials expect
to reap $14 million in energy and maintenance spending per year.
The plan greatly increases electricity demand—turns their GHG args
Sickinger 2014 (Ted; Pot Power: Indoor cannabis grows could drive big increase in regional electricity
demand; Sep 4;
www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2014/09/pot_power_indoor_cannabis_grow.html; kdf)
Fun fact of the day: Growing
four pot plants indoors sucks as much electricity as 29 refrigerators. Regional power
planners and utilities are taking note. In fact, the legalization of recreational marijuana in the Northwest could make
indoor commercial cannabis cultivation one of the biggest new drivers of electricity demand in the region in coming
years, according to new report by staff at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. And that growth
could come on bodaciously fast. The council is updating its 20-year forecast of regional electricity demand as part of the Northwest
Power Plan, which it issues every five years. Indoor pot grows may not use as much juice as new data centers or electric cars, but they're on the
radar as a potentially big driver, as well as an opportunity for energy efficiency. "We saw what happened in Colorado. They had a tremendous
growth rate," said Tom Eckman, director of the council's Power Planning Division. "These are large industrial facilities. Some of them are a
million square feet in Colorado. And it's an area of growth that can ramp up pretty fast." The council has no exacting estimate for current
electrical demand from marijuana growers in the region. But based on a survey of producers after Washington voters legalized recreational
marijuana in 2012, it estimates that demand in that state alone could grow by 60 to 160 average megawatts during
the next two decades. Oregon voters will get the chance Nov. 4 to do the same thing. Depending on the progress of legalization in the region,
the council's staff estimates that indoor pot growers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana could be using 240 average megawatts hours
of electricity by 2035. That's about 40 percent of the output of PGE's coal-fired power plant in Boardman, or a little less than what it takes to
power the City of Eugene. The
report cited a variety of reasons growers move their operations indoors, from
increased security and reduced growing cycle times to creating ideal growing conditions in terms of
temperature, lighting, watering, atmosphere and nutrients. That means indoor growing is energy intensive. Producing
a kilo of pot indoors, the study noted, takes about 300 times more electricity than producing the equivalent
weight of aluminum.
Water use in California is stable now- legalization guarantees endless drought
NBC News 2014 (Water-guzzling pot plants draining drought-wracked California; Jul 7;
www.nbcnews.com/storyline/legal-pot/water-guzzling-pot-plants-draining-drought-wracked-californian149861; kdf)
California cannabis growers may be making millions, but their thirsty plants are sucking up a priceless
resource: water. Now scientists say that if no action is taken in the drought-wracked state, the consequences for
fisheries and wildlife will be dire. "If this activity continues on the trajectory it's on, we're looking at potentially streams going dry,
streams that harbor endangered fish species like salmon, steelhead," said Scott Bauer of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Sign up
for top Business news direct to your inbox. Studying aerial photographs of four watersheds within northern California's so-called Emerald
Triangle, Bauer
found that the area under marijuana cultivation doubled between 2009 and 2012. It
continues to grow, with increasing environmental consequences. Bauer presented data to CNBC indicating that
growers are drawing more than 156,000 gallons of water from a single tributary of the Eel River, in Mendocino
County, every day. The average marijuana plant needs about 6 gallons of water a day, depending on its size and
whether it's grown inside or outside, according to a local report that cited research. Pot growers object to that number, saying that the actual
water use of a pot plant is much less. Although
the marijuana business has helped revive the local economy,
residents may now be feeling the effects of living alongside growers. And, as growers—some legal, some not—face a
severe drought, local law enforcement officers expect the fight over natural resources to intensify. "I never want to see crime increase, but I
have a feeling it will, because of the commodities that are up here," said Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey. "When we get to the end of
the grow season, which is August and September, the need for enhanced water availabilsity is gonna be there, and I don't think the water's
going to be there, so you're going to see people, I believe, having some conflict over water rights." Stream water rules in California are the same
for growers of marijuana as they are for growers of any crop: Growers should
divert no more than 10 percent of a
stream's flow, and they should halt diversion altogether during late summer, when fish are most
vulnerable to low water levels. But Bauer pointed out that those rules apply to permit holders, and most marijuana growers haven't
bothered to get permits. With so much of California's cannabis business operating in the more lucrative underground market, and with so many
growers across the region, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Humboldt County Sheriff's office say they lack the resources
to take action against all offenders. So they target the most egregious. "We get those calls daily. People are upset. Somebody
has dried
up a stream, somebody is building a road across sensitive fish and wildlife habitat, so that is happening on a daily
basis," Bauer said. "And we do our best with the personnel we have to respond to those calls." Sheriff Downey concurred with Bauer about the
manpower challenge authorities face. "We have a very active marijuana unit that is out there, especially during the grow season. But we have
so many grows here that we have a hard time keeping up or making a valiant dent in the marijuana growing in the county," said Downey.
"With
the increase in water usage and pressure upon that, that lucrative business becomes even more
lucrative because the price of the marijuana, the value of it, goes up even though we've had a glut on
the market the last few years," he added. One increasingly popular solution among some growers is the collection of rain water
during the wetter, winter months that they can use to water crops during the dry, summer season. "As long as cannabis farms
remain small and decentralized, there's no reason why we can't grow everything we need to meet the
state's demands using all stored rain water," says Hezekiah Allen, an environmental consultant and director of public affairs
for the Emerald Growers Association. And for some, it's a business opportunity. "I've heard people shut down their grow operations, bought
water trucks and have changed from growing to supplying waters to the other growers," said Chip Perry, a consultant for MC2, a service that
helps people obtain medical marijuana cards.
The plan emboldens industrial ag- turns the advantage
Rieman and Balogh 14—California Policy Manager, Drug Policy Alliance AND Co-founder, Emerald
Grower's Association
(Amanda and Tomas, “Shop Local, Buy Local: Why Small Farming Is the Future of American Cannabis Policy”,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-reiman/cannabis-farming_b_5481378.html, dml)
Sustainability and Public Health. The corporatization of the cannabis industry ignores the decades of
wisdom and expertise that small farmers have accumulated and follows the "monoculture" model of
farming, that is, the practice of growing a single crop or plant species in the same space year after year
and using large amounts of unhealthy pesticides and fertilizers. This is the basis of large-scale farm
corporations that have been trying to control our food sources for decades. We are currently moving
forward into an era where people are beginning to care more about how products they consume are
produced and where environmental stewardship is becoming paramount due to things like global
climate change. Due to this fact monoculture is being foregone in favor of the healthier and more
environmentally supportive system of polyculture (a farming practice that imitates the diversity of
natural ecosystems, thus, minimizing the need for pesticide and fertilizer use). Elwyn Grainger Jones,
director of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the
United Nations, recently stated, "Small farmers hold a massive collective store of experience and local
knowledge that can provide the practical solutions needed to put agriculture on a more sustainable and
equitable footing". Far from being an aberration or temporary fad, polyculture has been practiced for
the majority of human history with great success and America's small-scale farmers are the people best
equipped to carry on this tradition.
Ag is sustainable—new methods check
Avery 3 (Alex Avery, National Agricultural Aviators Association, Center for Global Food Issues,
12/11/2003)
21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable Ever
Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago.
They had good reason to worry. Soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human
society. Fortunately, modern farmers have invented conservation tillage, which cuts erosion by up to 90
percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers refuse to use
conservation tillage, because it relies on herbicides to control weeds; thus the organic farmers are
forced to used bare-earth, erosion-inviting weed control techniques like plowing and hoeing. Plowing
also destroys the feeding tubes of the mychorrizal fungi which produce the most important element of
soil health: a recently-discovered gooey glycoprotein called glomalin. (Again, organic farmers fail to
support their claims of better soil health.) Thanks to the combination of industrial fertilizer and
conservation tillage, a highly erodable farming area in Wisconsin is today suffering only 6 percent as
much erosion as it did during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. The author of that study says those who
claim high rates of U.S. soil erosion today “owe us the physical evidence.” We are creating topsoil faster
than we are losing it on millions of hectares across America, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Australia,
and most recently, in Asia.
1NR rels
Link threshold is low—we don’t have to win the plan totally destroys cooperation, just
that it spurs confusion and disagreement—that’s sufficient to pull relations off track
--collaboration and shared responsibility on security key—all the links prove the plan kills perception of
that
Wilson et al 13—Senior Associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars
(Christopher, with Eric Olson, Miguel Salazar, Andrew Selee and Duncan Wood, “New Ideas for a New Era: Policy Options for the Next Stage in
U.S.-Mexico Relations”, Woodrow Wilson Center Publications, May 2013, dml)
The presence of so many opportunities in bilateral relations does not mean that the path ahead is
obstacle-free. In fact, due to the intense blend of domestic politics and international affairs that makes up
the U.S.-Mexico relationship, without a determined effort on the part of both governments to keep the bilateral
relationship positive and productive, it can easily be pulled off track by scandals and
disagreements. Some policy areas are particularly sensitive. On security cooperation, for example, some joint
efforts implemented with the previous Mexican administration may be considered too risky by the new team; officials will have to take
care to move forward with an overall approach based on collaboration and shared responsibility even as
the details of cooperation are renegotiated. On the issue of energy, any discussion of cooperation in the area of oil still
requires sensitivity on the part of the United States, particularly at this time of potential change in the legislative
framework in Mexico. Similarly, the ability of Mexico to push for progress on a U.S. immigration reform is limited, and Mexican officials will
have to choose their strategy carefully.
The plan triggers that—at best it changes future public opinion, but short term
governmental opposition spurs disagreement which spills over broadly
Booth 12—Washington Post bureau chief for Jerusalem
(William, “Mexico says marijuana legalization in U.S. could change anti-drug strategies”,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-says-marijuana-legalization-in-us-could-change-anti-drugstrategies/2012/11/08/7e6d45ba-29ca-11e2-aaa5-ac786110c486_story.html, dml)
“The legalization of marijuana forces
us to think very hard about our strategy to combat criminal
organizations, mainly because the largest consumer in the world has liberalized its laws,” said Manlio Fabio Beltrones, leader of
Peña Nieto’s party in Mexico’s Congress.
Peña Nieto’s
top adviser, Luis Videgaray, said Thursday that his boss did not believe that legalization was the
answer. But Videgaray said Mexico’s drug strategies must be reviewed in light of the legalization votes.
“Obviously, we can’t handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least
in part of the United States, it now has a different status,” Videgaray told a radio station Wednesday.
Videgaray added that legalization
regards to anti-drug efforts.
“changes the rules of the game in the relationship with the United States” in
“I think more and more
Mexicans will respond in a similar fashion, as we ask ourselves why are Mexican
troops up in the mountains of Sinaloa and Guerrero and Durango looking for marijuana, and why are we searching for
tunnels, patrolling the borders, when once this product reaches Colorado it becomes legal,” said Jorge
Castañe-da, a former foreign minister of Mexico and an advocate for ending what he calls an “absurd war.”
Peña Nieto
has pledged to work closely with the U.S. government against powerful transnational crime
organizations when he takes office next month. But he has stressed that his main goal is not to confront smugglers but to reduce the
sensational violence and rampant crime — such as extortion, kidnapping and theft — that have soared in Mexico during Calderon’s six years in
office.
Jonathan Caulkins, an expert on the drug trade and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said the beginning of marijuana legalization
in the United States could
allow Peña Nieto to resist U.S. pressure to maintain a hard line against smuggling
groups.
Link only goes neg—the plan doesn’t end the whole drug war, but it desynchronizes
Mexican support for anti-drug initiatives
Lachicotte 13—Major, US Army
(George, “BEYOND THE BORDER: MEXICO’S INTERNAL CONFLICT IS THE UNITED STATES’ PROBLEM”, School of Advanced Military Studies Thesis,
May 2013, dml)
The legalization of drugs is a habitually argued solution because
it could possibly reduce the income to the drug
cartels in Mexico.268 However, if legalization of drugs in the United States has a secondary and tertiary effects, such
providing a gateway to harder forms of illicit drugs and forcing DTOs to other non-drug related illicit
activities, then a need for a secondary solution arises. Thus, a possible secondary, long-term solution would be to deter consumer addiction
which curtains the demand aspect of the DTO business structure maybe the pressure needed to limit drug trafficking, distribution, and
importation. The pressure of the kingpin strategy works to attrite command and control of DTOs. However, DTOs
continue to run like
a well-oiled machine devoid of any real leadership which makes it easy for the next to assume the
figurehead role.
The problem is not so much that the U.S. and Mexico lack a strategic guidance and whether that guidance is
correct. The problem appears to be two fold. First national strategies create isolated strategies that only focus on one
aspect of the problem. As a result organizations are organized, trained, equipped, and conditioned to deal with only a
single aspects of the DTO business model.
The second issue is located within the individual governmental organizations charged with developing and executing an
approach that links the strategic goal to the current situation. Governmental organizations interpret the NSS guidance based
upon their perspectives, influenced by their organizational culture. Due to their biased approach to the
problem and the desire to obtain credit, which leads to increased resources and individual promotions, organizations
become more self-protectionists. Governmental organizations are less likely to support the efforts of
another parallel organization because it means that the principle organization obtains the credit.269
Therefore, agencies that are justifying the existence of their organization seek to design their own approach to the problem devoid of any real
synchronization with other JIIM organizations. Essentially, the U.S. military struggled prior to the implementation of 1986 Goldwater-Nichols
Reorganization Act with the same issue.270 The narrative and rhetoric say that coordination, collaboration, and planning of military operations
work best when conducted jointly. Therefore, adopting
an operational approach that links strategic guidance to
tactical efforts incorporates simultaneity, depth, and tempo across the full array of JIIM organizations through
synchronized attacks against DTOs leaders, disruption of the illegal drug market, economic develop efforts from
international assistance, and the implementation of information operations. This can only occur with long-term policy
designed specifically to complement these efforts. A combined military, economic, and informational approach
collectively supported by intentional, regional, and domestic policies appear to be the most logical way to get
the current situation to the desired goals of order and, ultimately, peace within Mexico, as it did with Colombia in
the 1990s.271 This concept is not new or groundbreaking, however, the implementation of doctrine, especially U.S. Army doctrine appears to
be somewhat hollow. Instead
of piecemealing the elements of national power in order to subdue or contain
DTOs and the associated violence, the U.S. and Mexican governments need to fully commit to the fight against
DTOs by using a mutually supporting lines of effort and lines of operation from JIIM organizations. If strategic
guidance remains unsynchronization and focus remains centered on metrics that only produce short term
results, then operational planning and tactical execution will continue to diverge.
Drug war coop overdetermines the tone of US-Mexico relations—it’s the key factor
Wilson et al 13—Senior Associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars
(Christopher, with Eric Olson, Miguel Salazar, Andrew Selee and Duncan Wood, “New Ideas for a New Era: Policy Options for the Next Stage in
U.S.-Mexico Relations”, Woodrow Wilson Center Publications, May 2013, dml)
Rebalancing the U.S.-Mexico relationship: President Peña Nieto
has spoken of his desire to broaden Mexico’s agenda
with the U.S. to include multiple issues such as im- proving trade and promoting energy cooperation. In truth, U.S.-Mexico
relations have always been broad and complex, but there is little doubt that security issues were domi- nate
over the past decade. This reflects post-9/11 security concerns in the United States that translated into
greater emphasis on border security and perceived threats from po- tential terrorists and
undocumented border crossers, but it also reflects the priority the Calderón government placed on drug
trafficking. These factors and the exploding vio- lence in Mexico resulted in security becoming the most
frequently-reported topic in the U.S. media and a major concern among U.S. policy makers.