Never ask a woman her age

Never ask a man his salary

Never ask what why USAID spent $1.46B in Afghanistan to increase opium production.

USAID tried to change this state of affairs, spending $1.46 billion on "alternative development programs" from 2002 to 2017. The goal was to encourage farmers to move away from opium by providing fertilizers, equipment, and other assistance for non-opium farming. But some of that money "inadvertently supported poppy production," the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported in 2018.

In other words, Afghan farmers were happy to take USAID's help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there, according to SIGAR. Overall, the size of the opium fields grew from almost nil in 2001—the Taliban had tried to enforce a drug ban on the eve of the U.S. invasion—to 350,000 hectares (an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island) in 2017.

The failed war on drugs was not the only USAID boondoggle in Afghanistan. In a 2021 review of the war effort, SIGAR noted that USAID spent $335 million on a power plant that was rarely turned on, $175 million on roads that floods washed away within a month, and $7.7 million on an industrial park that had no power. Asked by SIGAR about its poor planning, USAID declared that micromanaging these projects would be "counterproductive" to the goal of "increasing Afghan self-reliance."

The reflexive need for seemingly erudite and outspoken TV progressives to leap to the defense of a program that has long done more harm than good is dizzying. That is, until you remember who is planning to acquire HBO.