Today On America's Least Brilliant Idea

So the plan now in Afghanistan is to win the war through angering the civilians?

It is seriously being proposed that the way to win the war in Afghanistan is to ... spray herbicide on the crops of Afghan farmers. I'd say that this is the kind of project that historians, with the perspective of a century, could say "Hey, that was really counter-productive and stupid." The problem is that reasonable people, with the perspective of eight seconds, can now say "Hey, this is really counter-productive and stupid."

There may be a way to stop the Taliban and anti-government forces from profiting off of the opium trade so much, but it's not like the fields have little flags on them saying "Taliban". There's no way to know. And in the absence of any alternative agricultural product, I don't see how you can deny the farmers their livelihood. Opium does not only make heroin, it makes medicine. It is far from an illegal crop. And in addition, farmers plant FOOD next to the poppy fields. Are we seriously planning to starve the population?

If the government came up with a scheme to subsidize the growing of alternative crops, maybe there's an opportunity here. In fact, the Bush Administration is pushing that idea publicly. But mass spraying is insanity.

UPDATE: It should be noted that boneheaded ideas like this, as well as mission-creeping the war on terror into the war on drugs, is part of the reason why we are losing ground.

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

Six years later, we've yet to even begin to understand.

UPDATE II: Great catch by Matthew Yglesias. All of our previous ambassadors to Afghanistan were Near East specialists with contacts throughout the Muslim world. But:

Now, though, our man in Kabul is William Wood someone who, though certainly qualified to be an ambassador, has no experience or expertise in the region. Instead, our top political official in the key battleground against al-Qaeda's main qualification seems to be that his previous post was as ambassador to Colombia. Implicitly, then, the decision is being made to view Afghanistan primarily as a drug control problem rather than as a Taliban-and-al-Qaeda problem. That's just crazy.