May 9, 2017 2:54PM # Endless War in Afghanistan and Colombia By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Two front-page stories in the [Washington Post today](http://thewashingtonpost.pressreader.com/the-washington-post/?key=p%2F9dxkfA95UC8nMuqxNf5CjZuy7GL9WqoLi0uUevX1eKKtnQdTVEHsCioHCjSgULF2Di9BQYCZvd%0D%0AN204FNnCL5cEajDuom%2B88taikZ12yz6y4poj6kXAPwuTDWQrlUMQ%0D%0A) tell a depressing story: > [President Trump’s](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-poised-to-expand-military-effort-against-taliban-in-afghanistan/2017/05/08/356c4930-33fa-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html?utm_term=.e59f839d7603) most senior military and foreign policy advisers have proposed a major shift in strategy in Afghanistan that would effectively put the United States back on a war footing with the Taliban…more than 15 years after U.S. forces first arrived there. > [Seventeen years and $10 billion](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/a-side-effect-of-peace-in-colombia-a-cocaine-boom-in-the-us/2017/05/07/6fb5d468-294a-11e7-9081-f5405f56d3e4_story.html?utm_term=.2c6869fb3a68) after the U.S. government launched the counternarcotics and security package known as [Plan Colombia](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/plan-colombia-how-washington-learned-to-love-latin-american-intervention-again/2016/09/18/ddaeae1c-3199-4ea3-8d0f-69ee1cbda589_story.html), America’s closest drug-war ally is covered with more than 460,000 acres of coca. Colombian farmers have never grown so much, not even when [Pablo Escobar](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/12/03/escobar-killed-in-medellin/36339ba2-8021-4942-8c7a-00604b95070a/?utm_term=.b0344b005e31) ruled the drug trade. There are high school students about to register for the draft who have never known a United States not at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And of course the policy of drug prohibition has now lasted more than a century, though the specific Colombian effort began only under President Clinton around 1998, getting underway in 2000. I wrote an op-ed, “[Let’s Quit the Drug War](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/lets-quit-drug-war),” in the New York Times in 1988. Cato scholars and authors have been writing about the seemingly [endless war(s)](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/president-obamas-legacy-endless-war) in [the Middle East](https://www.cato.org/publications/catos-letter/endless-war-middle-east) for years now. Maybe it’s time for policymakers to start considering whether endless war is a sign of policy failure. And maybe one day, a generation from now, our textbooks will not tell our children, We have always been at war with Eastasia. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Afghanistan](https://www.cato.org/afghanistan) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).