"The military situation is different, if only because the enemy has conveniently concentrated themselves in two provinces (Kandahar and Helmand, where most of the world's heroin currently comes from). During the last two years American and other foreign troops have gone on the offensive there, with special emphasis on drug operations."

 

The real reason for the profitability of criminalized psychoactive substances like Heroin is that there's consumerdemand for the stuff in the industrialized West.  The satisfaction of that demand is made a much more profitable enterprise because there's political - law enforcement - effort devoted to the partial suppression of manufacture and delivery, all of which amounts to nothing more than a government price support program benefiting the most successful criminal entrepreneurs in the drug trade.

 

As I've written here before, this is massively bone-headed. 

 

We'd like to achieve military and political success in Afghanistan, right?  The government's "War on (Some) Drugs" is without any doubt whatsoever the reason why the sale of drugs like Heroin reaps the high profits which fund the Taliban insurgency and the rest of the banditry in that country.  

 

What's that old saying?  "Amateurs study tactics and strategy; professionals study logistics." 

 

So to defeat the Taliban it's necessary to strike at their logistics.  If money really is "the sinews of war," how do the Taliban types get their money?

 

Right. 

 

If we really, really want to beat the Taliban and knock down the corruption in Afghanistan, we have to end our own absolutely idiotic "War on Drugs." 

 

When American and European dopers can satisfy their personal desire for popskull at the lowest possible price - Heroin or other opioids in truth costing about the same as one might spend for a loaf of the cheapest sliced bread in the supermarket - then the Taliban's profit picture goes down the toilet, and they're back to hammering bullets out of telegraph wire and blowing off their fingers trying to reload spent brass. 

 

Win the "War on Terror" by conceding the "War on Drugs."