On unwanted development

The good news from the AP is that at least one industry is downright thriving in Afghanistan. The bad news is that not surprisingly, it's the industry which Canada's forces are supposed to be eradicating:

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels — up by more than 40 percent from 2005 — despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press...

A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season — up from 257,000 acres in 2005 — citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime...

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimate that opium accounted for 52 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2005...

This year's increased poppy cultivation follows a 21 percent drop the previous year, suggesting the government has not followed through on warnings to farmers against planting poppies. Although 37,065 acres of poppies were eradicated this year, according to the Ministry for Counternarcotics, a campaign by police to destroy crops fell short of expectation.

From the article, it's not entirely clear whether the Karzai government has backed away from its previous interest in working with drug traffickers to try to rebuild the country. But it's beyond question that to the extent that Canada's role is based in part on an attempt to control opium production, the reality on the ground has only been getting worse. And with the profits from the resulting production likely to make Canada's other objectives more difficult as well, it's getting less and less likely that Canada's military sacrifices will have any positive long-term influence either at home or in Afghanistan itself.