The Pentagon Gets Into the Cashmere Business

Last year, as for most of the past 20, Afghanistan was the world’s leading grower of opium poppies. Thanks to a record harvest, the United Nations’ drug monitoring agency says Afghan farmers produced 80 percent of the global supply of the plants, the key ingredient in heroin, in 2013.

The U.S. has spent $7.6 billion since 2002 trying to eradicate poppy fields, to little effect. Now, with American combat troops preparing to leave at the end of the year, the U.S. government has a different plan: turn Afghanistan into the next cashmere powerhouse. “There’s pretty much always a demand for every ounce of cashmere,” says Karl Spilhaus, president of the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute, a Boston-based trade group. “Everybody would welcome an increase from Afghanistan.”