We flew into Marjah over a patchwork of poppy fields not exactly a sea of poppies, but plenty of them. It was two weeks before the harvest, and the last blossoms were floating away in the dusty haze of Helmand province, leaving the prohibitively weird-looking, blue-gray bulbs bald and ready for processing, like an army of alien vegetative creatures. We landed in a wheat field just across the road from the district governor's pathetic headquarters. It was Day 45 after the operation to retrieve Marjah from the Taliban had begun, and the highest-ranking U.S. military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman...
Harvesting Democracy in Afghanistan
With the Taliban uprooted from Marjah, will McChrystal's "government in a box" bear fruit?
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