Alexis:The United States could buy food supplies from Afghan farmers; each farmer who grows wheat is a farmer who does not grow the opium that funds the Taliban.

But the end result of growing wheat is you have a lot of grain, and it’s bulky, it needs a lot of water to grow and it requires trucks and roads to move it in sufficient quantities to make it worthwhile to grow. Afghanistan has few trucks and fewer roads. But it has a lot of mountain footpaths. That’s why poppies are an ideal crop there. It’s a hardy perennial, so to speak, which doesn’t need much water to grow. Farmers can have women and kids walking on goatpaths hand carrying bundles of poppies to their buyers and make enough cash for the operation to be worthwhile. And the only viable solution would be for the US to simply buy the whole crop every season and destroy it.