No wonder the Russians bailed - Afghanistan $$$

Afghanistan has a very minimal on-the-books economy. It's farmers raise the majority of the world's Opium crop but none of that shows up in the GDP. Seems to be a problem these days -- from Wired:

Broke Afghans Will Cut Their Military � And Obama�s War Plan
First the U.S. and its allies super-sized Afghanistan�s Army and police to fight the Taliban. Then they decided that those Afghan troops were their exit strategy. Now they�ve got sticker shock for how much the huge Afghan security sector will cost after they turn over combat duties in 2014 � so the Afghans announced that they�ll cut their own forces, even while they�ll be the only ones fighting the insurgency.

This is nothing short of removing a cornerstone of the Obama administration�s entire Afghanistan strategy. It�s an unforced error, costing over $10 billion, and completely foreseeable. In fact, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld foresaw it.

Here�s the problem. Afghanistan is an economic ward of the international community: the World Bank estimated that before the explosion in U.S. financing during the surge, fully 47 percent of Afghanistan�s GDP came from foreign aid. The annual price tag for the Afghan National Army and Police, according to a former top officer in charge of training them, is $6 billion. You foot most of that bill.

That�s for 352,000 soldiers and cops � an �end-strength� that U.S. military officials have laboriously worked to reach. They will reach it, the Pentagon expects, by the summer. And soon afterward, the Afghans will start� downsizing. According to Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister who�s visiting Washington, as a �conceptual model for planning purposes,� the Afghans will cut the force to 230,000 soldiers and cops after 2014. One-third of the Afghan forces � many of whom can�t read and kill Americans � will be gone.

Consider: the Afghans are waiting until after the U.S. and its NATO allies draw down their troops and end their combat mission to cut their force. Not only will the U.S.-led coalition spend money on Afghan forces who will soon be let go, those troops will leave the rolls precisely when their chains of command will have the vast majority of responsibility for fighting the Taliban.

But this move isn�t about security. It�s about cash. A NATO official admitted as much to the New York Times: �If something is unsustainable, either you have to find the resources to sustain it or you have to reduce the size of the project.�

Please correct me if I am wrong but the global pharma community could purchase the entire Opium crop of Afghanistan for double the going Taliban market rate. The pig-lovers would be S.O.L. for their operational funding for that year and whatever the global pharma community did not need for pain medicines, they could just burn and still come out way ahead financially. The sons-of-monkeys would lose their hold over the indigenous population and would have to find some other stone in the swamp to hide under. Like the article said, Rumsfeld foresaw it. It should not be that hard for our current regime to see that big-government fails every time it is implemented and what they are trying to do here is just big-government in a colorful clown suit. Time to get back on the message here...