...to opium growing in Afghanistan.
A more realistic, short-term proposal would be to buy the opium from the farmers. If we pay the farmers as much as the Taliban are paying for opium, it is not available for the Taliban to resell at a profit. We aren't going to get all of it, of course, but if we could even knock down the Taliban's share of the market to 30%, that would be a substantial reduction in Taliban revenue, as well as ending a source of hostility from Afghan opium farmers towards the Afghani government and NATO. The Taliban would also likely have to raise the price that they pay for opium, reducing their profit margin on resale.
In other words, we'd start a bidding war.
If we enter such a bidding war, we'll probably win – we have the resources for it.
Another possibility is that we might encourage other Afghan farmers to enter the opium business. Another possible problem is that we're not likely to care about the quality of the opium we buy. We'd just go ahead and pay the going rate, even for crap opium.
As a result, we might have opium farmers growing as much opium as they possibly can, selling the best of their crop to the Taliban for premium prices, and selling us the stuff no one else would touch, knowing we'll buy it regardless.
We'd have to give a lot more thought to implementing such a program. Right now, the only thing I can say about it is that it's better than what we're doing right now.
Hmmm... Maybe a two-tier program. We'll buy your opium, but we pay more for this or that other crop. (At the rate things are going, we'll need all the corn growers we can get to feed the demand for ethanol...)
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