Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border.
Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf).
There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran.
Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).
Sounds like an argument for legalizing drugs.
> legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic
Why not? Legalizing alchohol did seem to stop the flow of moonshine.
Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...
So American, lets just go and make a mess where nobody called us. Anyway, if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
who said that it is the cartels who produce the cocaine nowdays? How about government for example?
We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.
I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.