How to lie about Afghans with maps

Larry Rodgers

Last week there was a map of Afghanistan in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

You remember Afghanistan, don’t you? It was the target of our first military action after 9/11. The military action continues, but it only makes the paper every couple of weeks or so.

Anyway, the map in the paper was an economic one showing opium poppy production areas in Afghanistan. It could have been a different kind of map, of course. About.com has a link to a map showing land mine distribution in the country, and it’s kind of breathtaking because it shows that over one third of Afghanistan has a serious land mine problem. It’s kind of vague, as maps go, because most land mines aren’t accurately mapped. You find them by stepping on them while trying to farm or travel. In a way, the two maps are closely linked because the opium poppy production map shows that almost 90 percent of Afghanistan is given over to some level of agricultural effort that involves the opium trade.

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