In another case of military metrics gone wrong, the US military reported success in undermining Taliban financing after it paid Afghan farmers to destroy their crops of opium poppies. What went unreported, however, was that the farmers planted larger fields of opium poppies in response, in the hopes that they might be paid by the US military to destroy the crops again. When US payments didn’t come through, the opium was harvested and entered the international drug trade. Much of the ...