On Friday I recommended "The Taliban’s Opium War", an article by Jon Lee Anderson in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

The whole article is excellent, but if you haven't read it yet, consider this nugget:

The eradication team set off early for their first day’s work. There were nineteen Americans and a hundred Afghans in a convoy made up of twenty-four all-terrain vehicles—similar to small dune buggies—eighteen Ranger pickup trucks carrying Afghan policemen, and four of DynCorp’s white Ford F250 pickups. I rode in a truck driven by David Lockyear, an amiable six-foot-seven-inch Tennessean in his thirties, known as Doc Dave. Lockyear, who had a goatee and was covered with tattoos, was a paramedic from Nashville who joined the Marine Corps after September 11th. (“I was just pissed off, like a lot of people, and wanted to do something,” he said.) He fought in the first siege of Falluja, and in 2007 he went to work for DynCorp. He smoked a Marlboro and held a cup of coffee in one hand as he drove.

A great dust cloud formed as the A.T.V.s hyperkinetically whizzed past us and the trucks kicked up plumes of swirling yellow powder. Picking up speed, Lockyear exclaimed, “This is redneck heaven. You get to run around the desert on A.T.V.s and pickups, shoot guns, and get paid for it. Man, it’s the perfect job!”

As a point of contrast:

Nazir Ahmad, a bearded man in a long, opium-stained smock, said that he had twenty people to support and four jiribs of land, from which he expected to harvest twenty-five kilos of opium.

Before I left the field, Ahmad looked at me directly and said, “I know the opium is turned into drugs that destroy young people, and I am sorry, but we are twenty people and we have no help. We must grow it to survive. If we get help, we won’t grow it next year.”

Keep it real, Ahmad!