No one has a real interest in stamping it out. The politicians are on the take. The Taliban use drugs money to finance their operations. American, British and other Nato forces have come to realise that eradication programmes risk deepening local poverty and losing the very "hearts and minds" they are there to win.

With the Taliban resurgent, and with British casualties mounting, and with more illegal opium being grown than ever before, it is time to look again at one obvious solution. Surely we should be pursuing the argument first proposed three years ago by the Senlis council: to see if we can work with Afghan villages and farmers to develop a legitimate medical market for their crops. We have an ageing Western population; we are making infinite advances in fighting disease and in prolonging life. We are therefore going to be in need of ever more painkilling drugs. The people of Afghanistan have shown they can grow those drugs in quantity. Surely we should be helping them to turn those poppies into medicine.

To put it at its bluntest: why are we paying our farmers to grow poppies in Oxfordshire, and paying our soldiers to destroy them in Afghanistan? Be in no doubt that what British troops are doing in Helmand is heroic, and it is very far from futile. If Nato forces pulled out, the Taliban would probably overrun Kabul in three weeks, with catastrophic consequences for Pakistan and for global stability. That is why we need them there, and that is why they deserve to be properly armed and protected. That is why they need better domestic support than the bizarre fence-sitting of the Liberal Democrats, who simultaneously claim to be in favour of the Helmand operation while cunningly playing to their anti-war constituency by criticising its handling. Nick Clegg either believes we should pull out, or else that the operation needs more men and material. He should have the guts to say one or the other, and stop faffing around.