It’s a rare day when we get much good news emanating from Afghanistan. We’ve had a continuation of a brutal twenty-year-long civil war, a reversion of large swathes of the countryside to the control of bandits, and little progress in finding the elusive Osama bin Laden, with what little goods news being interspersed with the odd assassination, terrorist attack, or earthquake.

However, today was most certainly a good news day. Afghanistan’s opium production is now at an all-time high. That’s right, Afghanistan now has more land under drug cultivation than Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have between them.

“Huh. That’s a… novel… spin. I’m sure the BBC wasn’t quite as positive.”

No, of course they weren’t. Besides the BBC being possibly the most incompetent media outlet in the world (this is what they do), it, along with all the other major players, buys into the statist consensus on drugs far too easily. The fact is that taking drugs affects oneself and oneself only, and is therefore one’s own choice. The state really has no right, never mind a responsibility, to tell the people what they can and can’t do to themselves.

So, let’s look at that BBC story again, in the context of drugs not being bad.

Opium production in Afghanistan has soared to record levels, with an increase on last year of more than a third…

If you replaced the word ‘opium’ with something nice and wholesome - like steel, maybe - you’d get a very nice boast indeed. Imagine it’s the 19th century, and all that matters to the British government is the steel production figures (or, imagine it’s the 19th century and all that matters to the British East Indian government is the opium production figures). Doesn’t that make for a good headline? If I ran a company that increased production by one-third, I’d be looking for a slice of those record bonuses I’ve been hearing about.

… Helmand province is now the biggest single drug-producing area in the world, surpassing whole countries such as Colombia.

Helmand is becoming a competently horizontally-integrated production centre, benefiting from mass economies of scale. What they need to do now is focus on the verticality, preferably looking to get some of the jobs refining the opium from the UK. Isn’t that just called offshoring?

Afghanistan now accounts for more than 93% of the world’s opiates.

OK, that part doesn’t sound good. That sounds like a monopoly to me, which could lead to artificially-raised prices. We’ll have to break up Afghanistan into little pieces to promote competition. Fortunately, I think the warlords have done that for us.

Despite billions of dollars of aid and tens of thousands of international troops, the report says 193,000 hectares of opium poppies are being grown in Afghanistan.

Who said foreign aid doesn’t achieve anything? At several hectares of poppies per soldier, that sounds like a bargain.

“The results are very bad, terrifyingly bad, because cultivation has increased by 17% to an historic level, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, “No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities.”

Thank you, Signor Costa, for that here is the crux. Does it matter if it’s illegal? What matters is if it’s immoral. Stalin devoted tens of millions of hectares of prime Siberian real estate to promoting rural development. It used mostly political dissidents as labour, but it was legal, so it was OK, right? So implies Signor Costa.

What we need to do is ask ourselves whether our resources are best deployed in Afghanistan fighting farmers, when they could be fighting terrorists. Worse than that, by hunting down farmers that engage in entirely moral business, we are turning them into terrorists by depriving them of their means of sustenance and survival. That’s why the Taliban has turned Helmand into a fortress, and that’s why British servicemen are dying on an increasingly regular basis. To quote the campaign of the man that presided over half of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, it’s the economy, stupid. And that’s why, if we want to win the War on Terror, we have to put an end to the War on Drugs.

At the stroke of midnight last night, a momentous occasion in the history of this country occurred, as the United Kingdom’s military campaign in Northern Ireland was officially wound down for the last time.

Operation Banner was launched in 1969 to protect Catholics from increasingly aggressive Protestant paramilitaries, and, at its peak involved over 30,000 British soldiers. Even today, 5,000 soldiers are stationed in Ulster. Lasting 38 years, it is the longest military operation in the history of the British Army. Conducted at the cost of 763 servicemen killed and over 6,100 wounded, it is also the most deadly since the Korean War.

Yet, what distinguished Operation Banner from the preceding conflicts of the British Army was that it was an operation not against foreigners, but against British people. The operation was not primarily to thwart external threats (although many Republican terrorists did use the Republic as a safe haven), but to instil and maintain civil order. And, that was exactly what was fundamentally wrong about it.

The late King … did endeavour to subvert … the laws and liberties of this kingdom … by raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law … which [is] utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm.

What’s all this then? Well, since you ask, it’s the Bill of Rights 1689, which, like Magna Carta almost 500 years before, guarantees the basic rights of the people. It clearly states, in black and white, that it is against our basic rights to have the state maintain an army on operation in this country. Since it refers to the basic rights (hence its name) of man living in an enlightened society, the Bill of Rights certainly applies consistently across the country (even though it, like Magna Carta, originally applied to England and Wales only). And that includes Northern Ireland.

Similarly, as it refers to rights, it really doesn’t matter one way or another whether Parliament says the state can wage war against its civilians or not. After all, to misquote Louis XIV of France, Parliament is the state. At the most, it is the part of the state that seeks to legitimise the actions of the other parts. However, true rights are inalienable, and no one branch of the government can legitimise any actions of another branch that impinges upon the rights of man.

What was going on in Ulster in the 1960s was intolerable. Clearly, the minority Catholics were being oppressed, and threatened existentially in a way that no people can tolerate. However, the way for the state to combat that was not to garrison a standing army in the province and use it in active operations against fellow British people. The role of the army must be kept fundamentally separate from the police - the latter to defend liberty from internal threats, the former to defend liberty from external threats. Otherwise, the state may be tempted to employ the resources of the armed forces against its own people: a cataclysmic prospect in the age of industrialised warfare.

The Troubles ought to have been countered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the predecessors to today’s Police Service of Northern Ireland. The fact that today, after 38 years, the police have been restored as the rightful authority in the province is not just a reinforcement of the progress towards peace made in Northern Ireland since 1969, but a reinforcement of the progress towards liberty made in the whole of our country since 1689.