How To Win Afghanistan's Opium War -- Slate
The best way to deprive the Taliban of drug profits? The United States should buy Afghanistan's poppy crop instead of trying to eradicate it.
I used to know Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Her Majesty's ambassador in Kabul, and I have no reason to doubt that he was quoted correctly in the leaked cable from the deputy French ambassador to Afghanistan that has since appeared in the Parisian press. I think that he is right in saying that while there cannot be a straightforward "military victory" for the Taliban and other fundamentalist and criminal forces, nonetheless there is a chance that a combination of these forces can make the country ungovernable by the NATO alliance. He may also be correct in his assertion that an increase of troops in the country might have unwelcome and unintended consequences, in that "it would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets" for the enemy.
If Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated one point over another, it is that the quantity theory of counterinsurgency is very unsoundly based. If a vast number of extra soldiers had been sent to Baghdad before the disastrously conducted war had been given a new strategy and a new command, then it would have been a case of staying in the same hole without ceasing to dig (and there would have been many more "body bags" as a consequence of the larger number of uniformed targets). As it is, we have learned so many lessons in Iraq about how to defeat al-Qaida that we have the chance to apply them in Afghanistan. This is exactly the reverse of the glib and facile argument that used to counterpose the "good" Afghan war to the evil quagmire in Mesopotamia.
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My Comment: Christopher Hitchens sometimes is on the ball. His suggestion on what to do with Afghan's opium crop is a good one.
