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I was talking about Afghanistan, opium and RPG's. I was also speaking from personal experience not from TV experience.

• rdl 16y ago
  Afghanistan is actually much simpler than Mexico, making the case for either decriminalizing opium or at least doing the Italian red cross plan of buying all the opium produced much more significant than it is in Mexico, as I'm sure you're aware. Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border. Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf). There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran. Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).