This week Croatian police netted an impressive haul at a customs post on the border with Serbia. A Norwegian man driving into the country was arrested with 88.6 kilograms of heroin stored away in his vehicle, along with over a thousand boxes of cigarettes. The value of the narcotics amounts to 3.7 million Euros, about 4.75 million dollars. The suspect was looking to bring the drugs into the European Union with his family in tow. Apparently having the wife and three kids along for the trip was supposed to draw attention away from the 200-pound payload of heroin stuffed into his car. This may well have been a reasonable calculation on the Norwegian’s part, since the great majority of narcotics flowing from east to west do indeed reach their intended destination in Europe’s cities.

It is still undisclosed where the courier received the drugs, but we can make some reasonable conclusions about the shipment’s journey westward and who facilitated it. The logistics comprise the infamous Balkan Route.

The managers of U.S. interventions abroad tout quantitative measurements as "metrics of success" in pacifying the natives. So here's a metric the counterinsurgency crowd might find interesting: the number of U.S. soldiers seeking treatment for opiate dependency rose 50% in conjunction with Washington's recent "surge" into Afghanistan.

The rise in opiate addictions among U.S. servicemen is no mere coincidence with the surge in the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan produces over 90% of the world's supply of heroin. Over the course of five years, the Army's figure has "skyrocketed" over 500%, from 89 in 2004 to 529 in 2009. And these are only the reported instances, which usually compose a minority of actual cases of drug abuse. It's becoming increasingly hard to ignore the nexus between narcotics trafficking in Eurasia and U.S. foreign policy.