If we want to help Afghan women, then someone needs to help the Afghan economy, in a way that promotes the blossoming of liberal democratic culture. But it's not so simple, given the complicated facts about the Afghan economy.

Afghanistan has always had the problem that about 50% of their economy comes from smuggling and most of the other half has come from foreign aid. This was true in the sixties and it is basically true today.

This was a big motivating factor in the Soviet invasion. The USSR had supplied Afghanistan with so many millions of dollars in military aid that by 1979 the Politburo felt like they owned the country outright.

If Afghanistan is to escape from this dysfunctional economy based on smuggling and international charity, then we need to ask ourselves -- what do they produce in Afghanistan that has any market value other than the kind of attractive textiles sold by the Feminist Majority?

Right now they produce opium, but back before the first quasi-Communist coup by Mohammed Daoud in 1973, the produced an enormous quanity of very high quality hashish.

It was high qaulity because Afghanistan has a native hashish culture going back at least a thousand years, when the Sufi saint Baba Ku supposedly gave the secret of using hashish to cure the plague to ten Afhgan tribes.

If hashish were legal, then they could legally sell it on the international market.

Legal hashish might even be able to compete with the damned opium that overtook the country after the dictator Daoud had all the cannabis crops burned shortly after his 1973 coup.

If you charted the production of opium and hashish in Afghanistan since 1960, you'd see the hashish curve stay at a high level until 1973, when it falls rapidly. The opium curve would start at around zero in 1960 and then make a gradual rise starting from 1973 to where it is today.

If we're interested in stemming the tide of opiates from Afghanistan, then it would be better if they went back to the way it was before 1973, before Daoud's coup, when there was almost no opium growing in Afghanistan but wild cannabis grew in every roadside ditch.

Now what the heck does this have to do with women?

Go back and research Afghan culture in the sixties and early seventies. Just like in America, it's the mosty the liberals and the libertarians who built their counterculture around this medicinal drug. That counterculture was known for being antiwar.

Just like in America, it was the musicians, the actors, the artists, the liberals who used cannabis. The Sufis -- the kind of Muslims who are FOR women's rights.

The American mission of eradicating all cannabis from the Earth is not really helping Afghan liberal democratic culture blossom.

It's ironic in the extreme that Daoud and his authoritarian quasi-socailists actually believed they were helping liberalize the country by eradicating cannabis.

That's not at all what happened though. Everything went downhill after that. Authoritarian socialism alienated the rural population, and the collapse of the hashish trade impoverished the same people Daoud claimed he wanted to save.

Nothing Daoud did helped women at all. Look at where they are now. The country is worse off in every single way than it was before Daoud's coup.

If we want to undo the damage, then we need to consider undoing some of the things that happened in 1973 that helped send the country on the path towards total economic disaster and never-ending civil war.

By the way -- Daoud also helped create our current problem with Pakistan. His primary goal in taking over the Afghan government wasn't REALLY to turn Afghanistan in an authoritarian socialist paradise.

What Daoud REALLY wanted was to erase the Durrand line and take back the portion of Pakistan that he believed was part of Pushtunistan, the rightful Afghan Pushtun homeland.

This issue is still alive!

Fear of Pushtunistan is why Musharraf kisses the behinds of the Pushtun tribal leaders on the border who are now giving shelter to Bin Laden and supporting the Taliban.

So Americans are still paying for Daoud's coup in many ways.

Okay -- I hate Fox News overall, and I don't really know much about financial reporting.

But I do know about cannabis activism.

I've spent years and years watching the WSJ print "news stories" about the dangers of cannabis that were really little more than press releases from the ONDCP.

The New York Times used to do this too and so did most of the mainstream media.

But they eventually changed. We finally started to see articles in the New York Times and so on that broke this habit of just reporting what the ONDCP claimed was true, and included the opinions of cannabis activists and scientists debunking the latest "reefer madness" craze.

EVEN AT FOX -- when they do an article on cannabis, they balance the article between pro and con.

I can't ever recall seeing one single article on cannabis in the WSJ that was anything close to being balanced.

So I'm not PLEASED in any overalll sense by Murdoch's coup, but at least there might be a tiny silver liming in that the ONDCP could be losing its last major media outlet for foisting unadulerated Drug War propaganda on a powerful and influential audience.