Via The Daily Telegraph: “Nato forces were deployed in Afghanistan’s southern provinces in the summer to back up Afghan police and army units that Kabul charged with eradicating opium crops. But attempts to establish an official presence in areas beyond state control since the fall of the Taliban fell victim to counter-attacks by re-energised Taliban units…. With a mandate to bring schools, police posts and medical clinics to the villages of southern Afghanistan, Nato quickly fell foul of local rumours that foreign forces were out to destroy the poppy crop. To farmers with no other means of gaining cash, such claims became a rallying cry for the insurgency. Liam Fox, the Conservative defence spokesman, said the Government should abandon any pretence of prosecuting a counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan. “This Government was living in cloud cuckoo land on this,” he said. “To tell Parliament and the Labour Party that this deployment was part of the war on drugs was self-delusion.”

Indeed. It was that, and worse.