Oh, to be in Afghanistan again, when the poppies are in bloom!

If you need a symbol of how America's decade-long war is going in this faraway land, look no farther than the beautiful fields of red poppies flowering so bountifully there. Unfortunately, that bounty symbolizes a failure of an ambitious Western initiative against the Taliban forces.

Innocent little poppies are the raw material for producing opium — and the poppy crop in just one Afghanistan province supplies more than 40 percent of the world's opium trade. In turn, that illicit flower power fuels the Taliban with tens of millions of dollars a year to buy weapons, recruit and train fighters, make bombs, bribe...