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James Wimberley’s plea to do something about the under-treatment of pain in Africa (and other parts of the developing world) addresses a problem that has received less attention than it deserves, partly because pain, unlike death, isn’t very easy to count. His first-choice solution is to buy opium in Afghanistan to make into opiates [...]
Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category
September 29th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan, Drug Policy
Sourcing morphine for the poor from Afghan opium: I retract some intemperate language but not the idea.
August 15th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan, Drug Policy
Afghan opium: (repeats wearily), buy the stuff.
August 9th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan
Crop substitution may or may not be a better way of shrinking the poppy crop than crop eradication; they’re likely to be about equally unsuccessful. But in this case, failure is feature, not a bug: smaller crops mean higher prices and higher total illicit revenues.
August 5th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan
For less than 10% of the military budget for Afghanistan, we could eliminate rural poverty there.
July 22nd, 2009
Category: Afghanistan
Providing Afghanistan and other developing countries with money to pay the police enough to keep them honest doesn’t count as “development assistance.”
July 7th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan
An NBC News report last week painted a picture of military futility in Afghanistan. The more recent large operation in Helmand has a more cogent rationale, but it to suffers from viewing the Afghanistan fight as a US operation. Robert McNamara’s death reminds us that we will lose if we view it as our fight rather than as the fight of local (not initially national) partners who we contrive to support.
May 13th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan, Watching Conservatives
The headline of today’s LA Times column, by Max Boot: Obama’s right on target in Afghanistan The president has assembled an impressive military-diplomatic team and strategy that inspires confidence. Somehow, this doesn’t make me feel any better.
March 29th, 2009
Buy the Afghan opium harvest.
March 8th, 2009
Why did terrorists in Pakistan attack Sri Lankan cricketers?
