Mason Holcomb
English LA_202
Heather A. Holliger
3/21/10
The Opium War in Afghanistan
The War in Afghanistan has raged on for nearly a decade now and is getting worse as the Taliban gains greater control over the large tribal areas in rural countryside. For a time they looked defeated and on the run, but as the war drew out longer the jihadists seemed to grow stronger. There are several possible reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that they control the monopoly on the only product that still grows in Afghanistan, opium, which is a substance even dirtier than Iraqi oil to any American or British politician who faces elections, and is destroyed as a matter of official policy in Afghanistan for that reason. The destruction of the opium fields of Afghanistan, whose history in the region is long and deep rooted into the culture, is the fusion of the War on Drugs with the War on Terror and has brought with it the two main characteristics of the drug war, namely double standards and authoritarianism, which is the worst possible policy to commit to because it has reserved an enormous pool of wealth for the Taliban to draw strength and support from, and it is a strategy that will ultimately lose the war if it is not reversed.
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