Afghan opium 'hits record output'! Let's hear it for the workers of Afghanistan, for showing such industry and devotion to the free market ideal.
Can you believe that those plucky Afghans overcame war and earthquakes to turn in a 25% increase in poppy production during 2006? Now that's something to write home about; can you imagine the amazement if Detroit upped its production by 25% over the same period?
Actually, that'd be like Chevy increasing its production by 25% while we're subsidising Honda, because we gave Afghanistan $10bn in aid last year (in addition to our own military expenses) to spend on building its economy and providing alternative sources of income to poppy production, but Abdul Afghan overcame that hurdle to flood the world market with cheap and unusually pure heroin. Good on you, Abdul! Don't let the Man keep you down.
Aside: $10bn is $333 per man, woman and child in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's GDP per capita is $800, so that's the equivelant of giving $18,000 to every soul in the United States.
Actually though, what we did was to give $10bn to the government in Kabul, but Afghanistan is not Kabul. Afghanistan, as the Russians found out to their cost, is mountains and dirt tracks and remote upland fields, and a poor population living pretty much one AK-47 clip away from the Dark Ages. And what the government mostly spent it on was 'security', which in Afghanistan means passing it on as Danegeld to the warlords in order to keep a lid on their regions.
Oh, in other news, the UK has a shortage of diamorphine. Diamorphine is what we call heroin when it's prescribed by doctors. It's the same substance. If you need the cheat sheet: diamorphine good, heroin bad.
Cheap heroin in unusually pure concentrations is flooding the world market, and yet one of the nations with a major presence in the country of origin is unable to obtain any.
The mind... boggles. $10bn to prop up an urban regime disconnected from its people except where they're represented by warlords, a resurgent Taliban, and cheap heroin for everyone except those who need it. What a world we've created for ourselves by spreading democracy at the point of a gun. Is that Mission Accomplished yet, or should we push for breaking that 2006 production record in 2007?