Please explain the "strategy" here:

The United States government issues sharia-compliant micro-loans to Afghan opium growers NOT to grow opium. This US-tax-dollar-financed capitulation to Western-subversive Islamic law--woo-hoo! anyone awake out there?--isn't exactly working, given that  Afghans have produced more opium every year since the US invasion began. The Taliban, meanwhile-- who, not incidentally, practically eradicated the country's opium crop as "un-Islamic" while in power--skimmed $100 million dollars off the top of the 2007 drug crop alone, for example, to fund their sharia-inspired push to power against US and allied forces....

Wouldn't it be easier if the Taliban simply applied for some sharia-compliant US government loans and got done with?

Meanwhile...

U.S. troops in the south of the country are now instructed not to interfere with poppy crops, according to a report this week by the Associated Press from Helmand province, one of the prime sources of Afghan opium.

"Poppy fields in Afghanistan are [like] the cornfields of Ohio," U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Jerry Stover told an AP reporter embedded with his platoon in Helmand. "When we got here, they were asking us if it’s OK to grow poppy, and we said, ‘Yeah, just don’t use an AK-47 [assault rifle].’"