Mister Scheer has a number of other lucid essays on file at the LA Times, including this one on the peculiar results the Bush policies in Afghanistan have achieved:

"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality," said the executive director of the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa. "Opium cultivation, which has spread like wildfire … could ultimately incinerate everything: democracy, reconstruction and stability."

Costa's office has just released a slew of discouraging numbers that lay out in numbing detail how Afghanistan's opium production has soared in the last year to an all-time high. The raw form of heroin is now the staple crop in every province, while in just one year the area under poppy cultivation has increased 64%. The country produces 87% of the world's opium, and one out of 10 Afghans is employed by the illicit industry, according to the alarming U.N. report.

Of course, brandishing quotes from the U.N. doesn't sit well with isolationist yahoos. So, for them, here are highlights from the White House's own Office of National Drug Control Policy report, which Friday painted an even darker picture: "Current [Afghan opium] cultivation levels equate to a … 239% increase in the poppy crop and a 73% increase in potential opium production over 2003 estimates" — a sixfold increase in the three years since the Taliban was driven from Kabul.

No matter whom you listen to, then, the drug war in Afghanistan is a bust. Unfortunately, both the U.N. and the White House have repeatedly said the drug war and the war on terror are nearly synonymous, especially in Afghanistan, where drug money has long directly and indirectly aided and abetted extremists such as Al Qaeda.