Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category

November 10th, 2009

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?

November 2nd, 2009

Now what?

October 15th, 2009

James Vega’s urgent case for rejecting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan—and the imperial mission that the counterinsurgency model, surprisingly, requires.

October 11th, 2009

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.

September 29th, 2009

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 [...]

September 29th, 2009

Sourcing morphine for the poor from Afghan opium: I retract some intemperate language but not the idea.

August 15th, 2009

Afghan opium: (repeats wearily), buy the stuff.

August 9th, 2009

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.

August 5th, 2009

For less than 10% of the military budget for Afghanistan, we could eliminate rural poverty there.

July 22nd, 2009

Providing Afghanistan and other developing countries with money to pay the police enough to keep them honest doesn’t count as “development assistance.”