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Defence in the World

One does not have to disagree with the Secretary of State’s response—that it is not only a simple solution that is required—in order to state nevertheless that there is no excuse for pursuing the strategy, to which the US State Department seems wedded, of actively destroying, suppressing and even spraying the crops from the air, at a time when the basic principle of counter-insurgency means that we should be doing everything that we can to divide the insurgents from as much of the population as possible, not creating a natural alliance between the insurgents and the one eighth of the population who depend on the crop.