Part of the U.S. strategy in 20 years of war in Afghanistan? Weakening poppies

And then, after a couple years, the U.S. found itself mired in a really deadly conflict, and soon came to realize that the opium crop, which is one of Afghanistan's main exports, Scott, was funding the Taliban, funding the insurgency and also destabilizing the government the United States was trying to support. And it's not a direct connection, but there is an indirect connection in the sense that I spent nine months talking to people about the counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, and despite the perhaps temporary success of the CIA program, it was an abysmal failure. Interestingly, the opium or the poppy farming has moved from the south, where the CIA sort of attacked it back in the day, to more remote areas of the north.

Author: Daniel Ofman

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