Or we could just concentrate our efforts on the terrorists
Matt Levitt and a colleague write in The New Republic that counternarcotics is essential to counterterrorism. In the short term, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, from a strictly counterterrorism standpoint, we should probably be paying people in Afghanistan to grow opium.
Levitt is a sharp guy, but he seems to have missed the entire history of the U.S. drug war in Colombia in Clinton’s second term, wherein we pushed the country to crack down on the drug trade, driving the cartels into the arms of the FARC, which went from being a minor-league problem to a heavily militarized threat to the country’s sovereignty. (We also later shot down some civilians in airplanes, for added PR points.)
When we dispense with the moralizing and look at the reality, it’s a pretty simple process: we enforce laws that make it illegal for non-violent citizens in certain countries to earn a living; those non-violent citizens seek protection from those who seek to destroy their livelihood; the people who offer them that protection require them to subsidize violent activities; the violent people get richer; things get worse for everybody else.