The opium production sustains Afghan farmers. The opium almost does not reach USA.
The country most affected by the trade is Russia. Given that during their aggression in Afghanistan they wiped out many villages with inhabitants, is it unfair?
Trying to do anything in Afghanistan is pointless. Generations have tried, generations have failed. It will slip back into tribal and religious conflict soon enough and the best policy is to get out and leave well alone.
No, it’s not our country and not our business. Should a Muslim country that forbids the use of alcohol send in teams to blow up American breweries?
That depends on what you mean by “try to stop”. The current military presence clouds the issue, but if it wasn’t for that, is there a reason the USA and the rest of the civilized world shouldn’t use the regular means of international pressure to urge Afghanistan to curb the production of opium?
Hell no. It’s not our job to police the world. The US should stay out of other countries unless it is self defense.
No one’s mentioned yet that the fudamentalist regime U.S. overthrew had eradicated Afghanistan’s opium trade!
It was U.S. intervention, its alliance with crime bosses, pseudo-Friedmanist experimentation, and its stupid “purple-finger” election that brought back the opium.
Well, there was that, but there’s also the fact that internal repression makes that sort of thing so much easier. (The Nation from 2001; scroll down to Robert Scheer’s column.)
Stamping out the opium trade is about the only thing the Taliban were ever praised for by the West, which says a lot about the war on drugs and the prohibitionist approach.
Haven’t we been trying to stop things in that part of the world for far too long?