Let’s not replicate the mistakes of the Soviet empire in Afghanistan. Case in point: a plan to “fight” opium production (quotes needed to convey pointlessness) by spraying herbicide from the air. If the goal is to turn Afghan villagers against us and weaken the central government, then the plan has a good chance of success. Otherwise, it’s idiotic:

Critics say spraying would give the Taliban a powerful propaganda tool among villagers devastated by a Soviet campaign that destroyed food crops with aerial defoliant. “Aerial spraying would likely have a serious detrimental effect on the counterinsurgency front,” said Seth Jones of the RAND Corp, a global policy think tank based in California. “It’s hard to overstate how much disinformation there is among Afghan farmers. It would be fairly easy for insurgents to say: ‘The U.S. is spraying chemicals to kill your crops.’ And in fact, they’ve already started saying this.”