Originally Posted by
Christopher M
What gives you the impression that the US is partnered with opium warlords? To the contrary, perhaps the most significant contribution to the American inability to control or influence Afghanistan is the American policy of forbidding Afghan production of opium. For a substantial portion of the population, there's simply no economic alternative to poppies as a cash crop, and when Americans come and burn all the poppy fields and tell these people they can't grow any more if they want to be America's friend, these people quite naturally look for other friends -- not surprisingly, Afghanis don't love American enough to starve their families to death for it. This has been a well-known economic and policy problem since before the invasion. The Economist, for example, has been covering it fairly consistently.