We tried to find other people. Anyone with internal support was either too religious or too communist for our tastes, so we picked Karzai and his friends in the

We tried to find other people. Anyone with internal support was either too religious or too communist for our tastes, so we picked Karzai and his friends in the opium trade over anyone with actual ideological support (Karzai had tepid support from the opium farmers since he was their buyer, which was good enough for the US government). If you think things would be any different in Myanmar — home of the golden triangle — you haven’t been paying attention to the lessons of the last 20 years.