Real Compassionate Conservatism

A few weeks ago, Donald Rumsfeld went to Afghanistan, threw up his hands, and dared Europe to fight the illegal opium growers who have been the major funding source for the Taliban resurgency. Much of Europe is in favor of some form of legal licensing to allow Afghanis to grow it legally and cut the Taliban off from their funding, but the Blair government has mainly stood by U.S. efforts to keep it illegal and just eradicate it (although they've been a healthy check against some of our crazier ideas). But the official British position might change if the Tories have their way:

"The poppy crops are the elephant in the room of the Afghan problem," Tory whip Tobias Ellwood told the Guardian. "We're in complete denial of the power that the crops have on the nation as a whole, and the tactics of eradication are simply not working. Last year we spent $600 million on eradication and all that resulted was the biggest-ever export of opium from the country."

Instead, Ellwood said, opium farming should be licensed, with the harvest being sold legally in the open. That would help farmers, address a global shortage of opioid pain medications, and limit the supply of opium to the black market, where, after being processed into heroin, much of it finds its way into the veins of European junkies. According to Ellwood, the licensed opium plan has the support of several Conservative MPs and senior military figures in Afghanistan.

Conservative leader [David] Cameron has been open to outside-the-box thinking on drug policy issues. He has called for prescription heroin and even urged the United Nations to consider legalizing drugs.

If the UK gets on board with the rest of Europe on this front, we may see the beginnings of a radical new approach to dealing with Afghanistan's opium harvest, one that will finally be rooted in logic, pragmatism, and compassion. It's a healthy contrast from America's 'conservative' party, as illustrated by Illinois Republican Henry Hyde:

Mr. Hyde has pushed for more than a year for the Colombian government to dispatch some of its best counternarcotics personnel to Afghanistan, where the growing opium and heroin trade is providing cash to insurgents. Drug kingpins threaten to corrupt and derail the government of the democratically elected president, Hamid Karzai.

"If we don't defeat the drug commerce in Afghanistan, we might as well leave the country," Mr. Hyde said. "The quantity of heroin that is exported is staggering, and [kingpins] can bring any culture to its knees if they get too prolific. ... It's a form of chemical terrorism that can defeat a nation."

Defining the laws of supply and demand that drive the drug commerce as "a form of chemical terrorism" really shows how anything that upsets the Republican Party's simple-minded view of the world is now just seen as another form of terror. When you bank your political success on fearmongering, as the Repubicans have done for 35 years in the War on Drugs and 5 in the War on Terror, being forced to admit that fear has become the problem can be the most terrifying thing of all.