No, the solution is to take the idea of free water out behind the barn and executing it. Once the externalities are priced in, you'll see incredibly water inefficient and wasteful crops move to areas that can sustain them, and investment into improving water efficiency.

What you're proposing is the equivalent of wanting someone to lose weight and prescribing exercise, while also allowing them to eat two cheesecakes, four burgers, an entire shifts output of pizza and a handle of liquor a day. You can exercise all you want, they're still getting fat.

Well, aside from the fact this was always going to be a generational conflict if we wanted to actually change the country, a good start would have been building an Afghan military that wasn't entirely reliant on us for logistics, intelligence, procurement, maintenance, training, air support, CasEvac, you know. Literally every support function.

We cut the cord practically over night, leaving behind a military that was all tooth no tail, and then justified the abandonment as the same moralizing bullshit we use to claim poverty is the fault of the impoverished.

Could have just not left, leaving 40 million people to lose human rights was a bad thing actually. Or we could have actually built the Afghan army to operate independent of us instead of being 100% dependent on us.

Like, no matter how you look at it this is our fault.