A conspiracy theory, a conjecture, call it what you will–but isn’t it possible that Lieberman’s price for his health-care vote is more troops for Afghanistan?
Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category
James Vega’s urgent case for rejecting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan—and the imperial mission that the counterinsurgency model, surprisingly, requires.
We seem to be committed to a counterinsurgency campaign on behalf of a government than can’t govern. I’ve seen this movie before, and didn’t like the ending.
James Wimberley’s plea to do something about the under-treatment of pain in Africa (and other parts of the developing world) addresses a problem that has received less attention than it deserves, partly because pain, unlike death, isn’t very easy to count. His first-choice solution is to buy opium in Afghanistan to make into opiates [...]
Sourcing morphine for the poor from Afghan opium: I retract some intemperate language but not the idea.
Afghan opium: (repeats wearily), buy the stuff.
Crop substitution may or may not be a better way of shrinking the poppy crop than crop eradication; they’re likely to be about equally unsuccessful. But in this case, failure is feature, not a bug: smaller crops mean higher prices and higher total illicit revenues.
For less than 10% of the military budget for Afghanistan, we could eliminate rural poverty there.
Providing Afghanistan and other developing countries with money to pay the police enough to keep them honest doesn’t count as “development assistance.”
