Turkey did it. Can Afghanistan?

Today, it's Afghanistan. Ongoing attempts by the United States to obliterate the poppy fields of that embattled land have been a fiasco. Afghan fields now supply the opium for 92 per cent of the global heroin trade.

And Turkey? It's still growing opium poppies and selling the product – but not to the black market. It earns $60 million (all figures U.S.) a year exporting the raw materials that are turned into medical morphine and codeine.

The country's shift in 1974 from an out-of-control supplier of criminal narcotics into a licensed system of legal farming is a clear model for what could be done in Afghanistan. Or so a growing number of analysts are controversially arguing.