And on the opium front

The New York Times reports:

A suicide bomber on foot struck a police convoy about to head out on a poppy eradication mission in southern Afghanistan on Monday morning, killing 11 people and wounding 28, the police said...

Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand, said the success of recent efforts by security forces to destroy opium-poppy fields had prompted the attack on thecounternarcotics convoy, which was in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. “This was a work by Taliban and drug smugglers,” he said...

Apparently there have been many such attacks on these roads lately suggesting that the Taliban and their narcotrafficking enablers can take out whoever they want to on these roads but the ISAF and the Afghan security forces cannot take out the opium smugglers and insurgents who use the same highway.

I get why it's hard to intercept suicide attackers - who can tell what an individual is about to do? It's a logistical problem. What I don't get is why it is so hard to intercept the drug smugglers and insurgents who transit these same roads.

And I don't get why the eradication program focuses on eliminating the poppy crop itself. This only hurts the farmers who are largely subsistence and in many cases forced to grow.

Why don't they focus on the traffickers? Or at least legalize opium and then collect the taxes so Afghanistan will at least have some revenue base. Let the demand chain worry about the consequences for a change.