Seventeen years later America still has 8,475 soldiers in Afghanistan

And Afghanistan has a record 810,000 acres producing opium.

Fewer than 600 acres of opium production in Afghanistan keep the Taliban insurgency alive

There should be a relatively simple solution to that, but Politico has a story here about what we've been doing instead.

The United States is not a serious country.

Justin Raimondo is right, and Coulter and Nehlen are wrong: Afghanistan is the world's first narcostate, supplying over 75% of the world's heroin

Nuke Afghanistan's poppy fields, and you solve a lot of the world's problems. Raimondo is right, Coulter and Nehlen are wrong. Mexico isn't the "source". It's the conduit. 

From the New York Times in 2013, here:

Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and last year accounted for 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. “The assumption is it will reach again to 90 percent this year,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations’ top counternarcotics official here.

Inquiring minds want to know: Is it cheaper to stop drugs by building a wall or nuking the opium fields of Afghanistan?

The $15 billion cost of a wall would buy you roughly 750 upgraded B61 nuclear gravity bombs.

Each one can incinerate about 50 square miles.

Afghanistan has about 780 square miles devoted to opium production.

Number of B61 bombs needed: just 16.

Cost $320 million.

Hundreds of bombs left over to enlighten other ne'er-do-wells.

Three pleasant outcomes: 1) Drugs eliminated at the source; 2) Afghan War ends immediately; 3) Drug mules and gangs stop coming over the border.

I say we nuke 'em.

Single deadliest attack in 16-year Afghan war, perpetrated by just 10 Taliban, kills over 140

This is payback for the MOAB attack. 

So bomb the water supplies in Afghanistan now. Cut off the money they make from well-irrigated opium.

From the story here:

Dressed in military uniforms, a squad of 10 Taliban militants drove in two army Ford Ranger trucks past seven checkpoints. They arrived inside northern Afghanistan’s largest military installation just as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed soldiers were emerging from Friday Prayers and preparing for lunch.

For the next five hours, the militants went on a rampage, killing at least 140 soldiers and officers in what is emerging as the single deadliest known attack on an Afghan military base in the country’s 16-year war. Some assailants blew themselves up among the soldiers fleeing for their lives, according to survivors, witnesses and officials.

If DHS' John Kelly really cared about 4 tons of drugs coming in daily, he'd stop it

General Kelly here in the Boston Globe:

[Transnational criminal organizations] smuggle nearly four tons of heroin, cocaine, meth, and other illegal drugs across our border each day. In 2015, 52,404 people died from drug overdoses. It was the highest number of drug-related deaths our country has ever seen.

If our country really cared about it, we'd have ended opium production in Afghanistan yesterday. But it's been in our power to do for over 15 years. So obviously we don't do it because of the MONEY our corrupt country makes off the operation. And . . . it would be against LIBERTARIANISM, in which everyone believes more than saving Americans from the horrible consequences of drug addiction.

All we have to do is blow up the damn dams we built for those bastards after World War II.

17 MOABs and we're done. Over 90% of the world's opium production would end, just like that.

Mother Of All Bombs tested on the wrong target in Afghanistan, prolonging the 16-year war

They bombed caves. If they had meant to end the war, they would have bombed the Kajaki dam instead, ending electricity and opium production in Helmand Province instantly:

Hysterical Glenn Beck makes hysterical liberals, well, hysterical

It's hard to keep all the hysteria separate at The Daily Beast, where libertarian hysteria meets liberal hysteria and proves what we knew all along: hysteria is a defining feature of both liberalism and libertarianism.

Glenn Beck:

'“I would open it up to all drugs [potentially being legalized],” and leave it up to the states.'

The Daily Beast:

'In Beck’s telling, the main consequence of this police escalation and the war on drugs was not the mass incarceration of millions . . .."

The one exaggerates what society can stand, the other what it can't.

Beer, wine and liquor have a long record of being more or less controllable while opiates do not. No one with much experience of the latter is clamoring for their wider use.

On the other side 2.3 million adult incarcerates barely qualifies as millions in a society of 321 million people. The only people demanding the release of the duly captive are Democrats and other racists.

MAKING AFGHANISTAN SAFE FOR THE OPIUM TRADE

Not that long ago, going to war meant destroying the enemy's ability to make it on you.

That quaint idea has been replaced by the asshats' better idea of "winning hearts and minds."

In Afghanistan we're trying to do that with electricity, which the Taliban in turn steals in areas it controls and "sells" to the locals, who use it to power irrigation pumps which help the opium poppies grow. Like good organized criminals, the Taliban then also skims the drug trade pipeline to Iran to fund its insurgency.

The electricity skimming operation nets the Taliban about $4 million annually, according to this report in The Wall Street Journal. But the drug skimming must net them far more. The United Nations estimates the export value of Afghanistan's opium production at $4 billion annually, only a quarter of which may actually go to the growers.

You'd think "shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out" would be the appropriate response to this situation, if it were a real war. But then you would be wrong. Instead, America is making Afghanistan safe for the Taliban gangsters and for the world's primary source of heroin.

So far the Kajaki hydroelectric power plant in the south has gotten $100 million in upgrades from the US. $400 million more is being requested for 2011, some of which will go to fund electricity generation also in the southern city of Kandahar.

In a real war the dams and power plants would be targets. That we can't even imagine the necessity of destroying them explains why there's not going to be a victory in Afghanistan for the US.