in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke, we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while altering the "hearts-and-minds" balance that has been tipping away from us. I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.
Why the US has an inability to see beyond myopic and moralistic strategies in foreign policy I will never understand. Why not buy the stuff? It is cheaper to buy it than deal with its consequences on so many levels it strains credulity that we have rejected this strategy. It supports the people of Afghanistan. It takes drug supply off the open market. It denies funds and supply to our enemies. It denies our enemies a recruiting tool. Sometimes I wonder what the politicians in Washington are smoking.
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