Thomas Schweich, the former enior counternarcotics official in the United States Embassy in Kabul, is claiming that the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt and that Afghanistan is nearly a narco-state.

The allegations as reported are alarming, but when you read his essay on the his experiences there, it becomes far less concerning.

It’s clear that this guy is a hard core drug warrior. He opposes payments in lieu of growing poppies, supports aerial spraying of defoliants, military operations for poppy eradication, etc.

This is precisely the sort of crap that pushes peasants to the Taliban, but he sees everything through the lens of “drugs bad”, and ignores secondary effects, so he’s now writing a tell-all.

It is this myopic view that created the disaster of prohibition, and is fostering the disastrous ‘war on drugs” now.