Your 'solution' is ( very much like Bill White's solution in Iraq) :

1. do the Afghans an emotional favor/flattery by supposedly 'admitting' their free and independent status

Problem with that assessment: they are not free or independent: they are slaves to failure in the guise of religion and dependent on those lies ..to avoid the mere emotional negatives that those in the West might know something they do not. The money is the drug that keeps them in the dreamland of "I'm just as good as.." while false religion rapes them day and night.

You seem to be following the "strategy" of the civil rights template that has never once resulted in true freedom for those who even now support it as if it had. They are still angry, still poor (in the whole truth of what poverty is) for the most part, and still trying to be "as good as" --which means the whole policy FAILED.

True brethren in no way seek to emulate each other in that manner. The whole effort is to make true brethren. The whole model you seem to be advocating only reflects the success of those who prance around as liars advertising themselves and their own lifestyle as a type of Utopia that ought to be copied by anybody and the path there is always emotional as opposed to real. Fake royalty seeks to advertise itself and catches many in that trap. Real royalty seeks to minimize governance and make all true brethren so that none seek to be like others but all are unique and cooperative in that absolute uniqueness they already have rather trying to ditch it in favor of copying another. It is not at all a true success to merely have Afghanis in peculiar hats and clothes doing the lockstep of liars "the Afghani way" and rejoicing in weird language, music and dance steps at having done it. Islam is a failure as social policy in that regard and every regard.

If you really think that is what "the West" wants ..you are quite beside yourself with delusion and have only spoken what you think the West wants as a taunt in that you must think we are despicable people and yet who want to be copied as that despicable character.

2.Keep bribing.. keep paying.

I suppose it a small thing for the indigenous people of ( insert ..anywhere and everywhere ) to know that money comes from somewhere and it ain't free. Paying bribes is the exact thing those in the article you quoted warned about:
it pays the victim of sin for the disease of avarice and greed as if they were not victims of sin but wise for doing evil --as doing what they thought those of the West lived as ideal lifestyle.

We've got people setting us against each other that are not part of the overt "sides" of the war. Your response to the problem of drugs is to pretend those people don't exist and the "sides" are in some existential arena of reality called free will that just happens to coincide exactly with the LIES we are all fighting, yet as if those lies were the path to peace between "sides".

If it were a matter of emotional stuff: you insult the West, you denigrate your own family; you malign being a human being when you use the tools of those who set peoples wrongly against each other as a kind of policy initiative.

Wake up. We're not as evil as you make out. You aren't either and I never thought that about you. I knew you were lost. But I never hated you that I should set you up in some prissy crap of "free and independent" like an ignorant child getting raped as merely handing you off to wicked overlords because it was easy to wash my hands of you and your whole lostness.

You should have a cartoon of a man desperately holding onto another man because he is forced to by God, the other man is dangling off a cliff and people gathered to watch the whole thing are shouting to the man dangling that the other is denigrating him on purpose and ought to either pull him over the edge with him or cut off his arm. If he does it all the people shout "Praise Allah!" ( or Kali) as the man dies on the rocks --as if they celebrate a victory on his behalf merely because they were offended when they saw they had been deceived generations ago as if that were the fault of the man God was using to hold on to the dangling man and they had "got even".

Ecc 4:1-3 And I returned and saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors was power, and they had no comforter. Then I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive; and more fortunate than both is he who hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen

But once again, Karzai and his Pentagon friends thwarted the plan. First, Anthony Harriman was replaced at the National Security Council by a colonel who held the old-school Pentagon view that “we don’t do the drug thing.”

I have wondered what the rules of engagement are for US forces should a Taliban force attack a drug caravan of one of the Karzai supporting drug warlords. I suspect we would de facto act to protect the drug shipment by protecting the warlord from the Taliban while doing nothing to interdict the drug shipment. Maybe that has changed recently, but what has the policy been over the years since 2002?

It has been obvious since Bush shifted focus from Afghanistan to Iraq that the Afghan situation was headed for failure, for this one reason. Allowing narco-warlords to re-establish themselves in Afghanistan was a sure fire recipe for long-term instability -- it is only a matter of time before the Taliban sees the error of its former drug eradication ways and adopts narco-terroism (it allegedly already has to some extent -- what better way to finance an insurgency?).

How can there be a serious security plan for Afghanistan which allows the drug trade to thrive? It has been a collosal stupidity by the decision makers for the last 6 years. I can understand Pentagon reluctance to involve themselves in it, but how can any serious military thinker concerned about stability in Afghanistan ignore the drug issue?

I suspect that the door has long since closed on the opportunity to do something about it. It seems unclear how Afghanistan can be fixed now.

...the Cultural Revolution, Korea, Mao's promise to Ho Chi Minh to intervene in Viet Nam if the US came north of the DMZ...thus Guaranteeing the defeat of America and the death of 59,000 brave American Soldiers...all of my life has been haunted by China...

But likewise China from the West. It is impossible to read and understand The Opium Wars, (book highly recommended), and not fathom China's deep distrust of the West and everything it stands for.

As the book notes...if Colombia by force of arms compelled the United States to allow in a free flow of Cocaine....how would we feel toward Colombia?

From the reviews of the Opium Wars:

The Opium Wars is a well written chronicle of the shameful period in the nineteenth century when Great Britain sank to the level of an international drug cartel. The British Empire forced China's Qing Dynasty to allow huge shipments of opium into its territories in order to reduce Britain's huge trade deficit. The details of how Britain contributed to the decline of China are astounding but well documented.

and this:

While the British ignore this sorry episode and Americans are largely ignorant of it, the Chinese remember Western aggression and their victimization all too well. Opium plagued China for another century, although most was home-grown by 1900. On the eve of World War II 10% of the population was addicted, with 30% of Hong Kongs population addicted (Not the image of efficient British colonial administration, is it?). Massive opium addiction did not end in China until the Communists brutally cracked down on it after their 1949 victory. The authors conclude, The Great Helmsman just said no.

*******

Which is not to note and admit that Opium is one very fine drug...but England and America were pushers.

Just sayin`

Traveller

with buying/eradicating the opium crop and paying off the farmers. Let's assume that the dollar figures of the value of the drug are inflated (as they always are) and that we could purchase the entire crop for $2 billion/year. That means for what we spend in one month in Iraq we could eliminate 90+% of the world opium supply for the next six years. That seems like a good deal to me.

Demand reduction is just not going to work. From what I read, there's a serious heroin problem in Iran - if they can't control it, with harsh drug laws including the death penalty for trafficking, I don't see other countries being any more successful.

I blame it all on the Internet