But CG, the poorer the opium crop, the less money in the hands of the enemy. This worked well when Bush froze many of the bank accounts of known al-Queda etc. groups. They lost some wealth and were therefore less organized and less able to pull off complicated attacks like 9/11 and had to resort to morons like Richard Reid the shoe bomber, the kid with the bomb in his pants, and the Times Square would-be bomber.

I agree with you that we should be long gone from A-stan and Iraq as well, but as long as that's not happening, financial disruption seems to be our most effective weapon.

That's been OBL's most effective weapon against us too! That is, if you consider that 9-11 was a financial attack. And I do. So far, we've done everything he has wanted.


They don't call it the graveyard of empires for nothing!

Financial disruption may be an effective weapon, but I prefer the KISS principle.

That doesn't mean I believe the US couldn't have introduced a plant disease, it only means that plant diseases, particularly fungal diseases, happen--usually because the spores are already around and the conditions are right for them to grow and multiply. Every backyard farmer knows that.

Once the spores are in the ground, the farmer only has a few choices--the most assured one being to take off the top soil and replace it with new, preferably irradiated, top soil.

So I hope what's killing the poppies is a fungal disease.