Sindark is right about the Senlis Council. I don't know where Hitchens got the idea that counterinsurgency warfare isn't labour intensive. It is the most labour intensive form of warfare. He should read Petraeus' COIN Field Manual, FM 3-24 which can be had, free of charge, in PDF format on the web.

At the end of the day, the key to our woes in Afghanistan has little to do with opium and almost everything to do with overcoming warlordism and tribalism. No one can resolve the opium question while these two, fatal afflictions go untreated.

Karzai controls 30% of the country, tops. The rest is divided up between the insurgency and various warlords. What feeble government Karzai does assert is hopelessly corrupt and divided. Hint: how did the warlords insinuate themselves into the legislature to the extent they could force through an amnesty for their own barbarous crimes?

The Afghan National Army won't last long without a viable, central government. During Afghanistan's communist rule the army was three or four times larger than it's successor today and it dissolved into ethnic militias when the government collapsed upon the Soviet departure.

The insurgency is growing well in this power vacuum. What began as a Taliban resistance has now spread to embrace 14-separate entities and is spreading rapidly out of the south across the rest of the country.

There is not one ethnic group in Afghanistan that hasn't been at war or allied with each of the others at various times. Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen - you name it. You can't have a viable central government without overcoming that tribalism. You can't have an effective army without a viable government and you certainly cannot deal with the opium problem without both a viable central government and an effective national army.

We really do need to stop deluding ourselves about what's going on in that country.

rdresser:

At the end of the day, the key to our woes in Afghanistan has little to do with opium and almost everything to do with overcoming warlordism and tribalism. No one can resolve the opium question while these two, fatal afflictions go untreated.

There is not one ethnic group in Afghanistan that hasn't been at war or allied with each of the others at various times. Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen - you name it. You can't have a viable central government without overcoming that tribalism. You can't have an effective army without a viable government and you certainly cannot deal with the opium problem without both a viable central government and an effective national army.

You can't "overcome warlordism and tribalism" without changing Afghan society from the bottom up. What you can do, what strong rulers have historically done in Afghanistan, is to coopt it by buying off enough of the warlords. Sometimes that was done by a share of the loot plundered in Afghan conquests of Iran or norther India. Sometimes, as in the dynasty that ruled Afghanistan through the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, it was done by a share of the bribes and subsidies the Russians and British paid for influence over the central government. Part of the money went to keep most of the warlords content; the rest went for an army strong enough to make examples of the ones who got out of line. The other side of the deal, of course, was that the central government did little or nothing to interfere with the way life had always been lived out in the villages.

The opium trade has become the substitute for the age old Afghan practice of looting their richer but less warlike neighbors. Using it to buy off the less religoiusly zealous of the tribal leaders, makes a lot of sense.