I try to write more in the theoretical here just because a lot of folks on this blog are on the ground in Afghanistan or elsewhere in CAsia who don’t need someone stateside telling them what to think about their neighborhood…I’ll write more about there when I’m there, I’m just trying to talk about possibilities until then.

And Dafydd, you know as well as I that nobody in your or my home countries’ governments is ok with poppy as a cash crop. Unless the good people of Afghanistan collectively turn to eat as much makowiec/makowki/makos guba as I do. Perhaps I could even go to Kabul to become an ambassador for poppy deserts. It may sound strange, but it can’t do less than roadbuilding initiatives.

I’ll give you a clue. P_ _ _Y.

And if the Afghans start draining off more water from the Amu Darya, this could aggravate relations with northern neighbors like Uzbekistan.

Obviously for a landlocked nation, desalinization is not an option either. It seems that, for Afghanistan at least, the jatropha plant is a false panacea.