Rubin: Liberal Reality Attacks Bush Appointee's Claims on Colombia and Afghanistan

One of the recurrent themes in Tom Schweich's report from the front about how "odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban [prevented] the implementation of an effective counterdrug program," is that the strategy he was proposing was tried and true. It had demonstrated its effectiveness all over the world, especially in Colombia.

This just in:

PASTO, Colombia — Along with Colombia’s successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellín have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogotá, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war.

But it is a different story in the mountains of the Nariño department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it.

Soaring coca cultivation, forced disappearances, assassinations, the displacement of families and the planting of land mines stubbornly persist, the hallmarks of a backlands conflict that threatens to drag on for years, even without the once spectacular actions of guerrillas in Colombia’s large cities.

Soaring narcotics cultivation in the areas affected by the insurgency . . . . Sounds just like Afghanistan. . . .

But then "reality has a well-known liberal bias."