There's a joke in my family (between my mom and me, at least) that my sister's boyfriend is a mercenary. Except that it's not really a joke. My sister's boyfriend (we'll call him Tom) works for an American security contractor in Afghanistan (I don't know which one). His job is to provide air cover for his coworkers who are on the ground eradicating Afghani poppy crops.

Full disclosure time: I'm not an expert in US drug policy or US policy toward Afghanistan. I'm not presenting this as information so much as discussion. I know what I know from conversations with people, including Tom, who have more knowledge than I do regarding the situation.

The opium poppy is Afghanistan's largest cash crop. It funds the Taliban, which is one reason why the US is so intent on doing away with the crops. In the always-circular discussion about the even-more-circular drug wars, however, it's easy to forget that the opium crops also fund the farmers. Most of the farmers are not Taliban. They're farmers.

Here's the way it works: The Taliban will loan a farmer money, in exchange for which the farmer will give some or all of his crop to the Taliban, who will sell the opium, which is made into, among other things, heroin. Or you can smoke it straight. It smells very nice. ;-)

What American contractors like the company that employs Tom do, though, is destroy the crops, generally with herbicides. This is bad for the Taliban, who is now out the money they loaned and out their large profit from the sale of the opium. Who else is this bad for? You guessed it--the farmers. They're already poor, and now they owe the Taliban money, which is decidedly less pleasant than owing, say, Fannie Mae money. And here's where feminist outrage at US policies really comes in: the farmers have no crops and no money to make good on their debts. Many of them do, however, have something: women. Farmers are selling their daughters to the Taliban to settle their debts, a situation they would not be in if it weren't for American mercenaries and their herbicides.

According to many, including several prominent British doctors (and Tom), there is a global shortage of legally grown opium for medicinal use. It would, according to these people, be cheaper and more effective to buy the opium crops and produce legal, controlled drugs such as morphine. This was difficult for me to substantiate: a Google search only turned up one article later than 2007 (http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/February/08020801.asp). Generally, though, there seems to be some disagreement on whether the opiate shortage is an opium shortage at all, or whether it's an issue of inefficient production and distribution. Further, those against buying up the Afghani opium supply argue that the country doesn't have the political, economic, or infrastructural stability to support a legal opium trade.

None of this is news, in the purest sense of the term. Discussions about legitimately buying the crops have been going on since the Taliban lost power, and the larger debate surrounding the effectiveness and justice of US Drug War policies is decades old. But it's news in the sense that, at least in the United States, you have to go looking for it. Drugs Are Bad is a pervasive, nonnegotiable mantra for many in the US government and in the public, and ever since we razed Iraq to the ground, nobody wants to hear about how we're royally screwing things up in Afghanistan, too, because that was supposed to be a victory.

Here's the news, though. Most articles you find will tell you about how American contractors physically and chemically destroy the crops. What they generally don't mention, though, and what I only know because Tom told me, is that they don't stop there. A man that worked for the same company died recently. He wasn't shot by a desparate farmer or a Taliban security force. He drove a tractor into a ditch and didn't jump out in time, so it overturned on him. HE DROVE A TRACTOR INTO A DITCH. ON PURPOSE. They aren't just destroying the crops, you guys. They're destroying the equipment. The US doesn't care about the farmers, or their daughters. They don't care about making a living for poor families. They're not presenting any alternatives, and they're in fact preventing alternatives. They might as well be salting the earth.

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