Afghanistan's new jihad targets poppy production

Still, enhanced law enforcement can go only so far in an agrarian economy where much of the farm infrastructure - grain silos, irrigation systems, cotton gins, sugar mills - has been destroyed during the 25-year period of war. The solution, many agriculture experts say, is rebuilding this infrastructure so that farmers at least have some legitimate alternatives to growing opium.

"Farmers do not need poppy if the government and the foreign donors will support the traditional cash crops," says Richard Scott, a former USAID agricultural expert who has just finished a six-month project to renovate irrigation canals in Afghanistan's Helmand Province.

Over the past decade, the Helmand valley has become Afghanistan's primary opium growing area, but Mr. Scott says that farmers have no particular fondness for poppies. "The farmers are fairly direct in what they want, and it is not necessarily poppy in Helmand. What they need is a better price for cotton at the government-run cotton gin, so that they can make a living from a legal crop."

Last week, the European Union announced it will spend $477 million over the next two years to curb drug production here. About 30 percent of that money will go toward alternative crops.

Like the Afghan government, drug traffickers are exerting influence over farmers through carrot and stick programs, and the drug traffickers appear to be better funded. Many farmers receive payments in advance for the coming poppy crop, a fact that, in practice, obligates them to grow poppy even if it is against the law. And with police corruption so rampant in drug-growing areas, farmers often find that police are the people encouraging - or forcing - them to grow poppies.

Arresting drug dealers, of course, is one thing. Putting them on trial is another. One of the most daunting tasks in Afghanistan's war on drugs is the long-term project of creating a working criminal justice system. Afghanistan's problem was highlighted late last month when the US arrested a suspected Afghan drug smuggler, Haji Bashar Noorzai, in New York City. Ministry of Interior spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said at the time that Afghanistan would not have been capable of bringing Mr. Noorzai to justice without US help.

At present, Afghanistan has 40,000 police who are so poorly paid ($40 a month for policemen, $80 for officers) that many are unwilling or unable to arrest drug traffickers. Afghan prisons are so out of date that many prisoners escape, or bribe their way out of jail. And the country's judges and prosecutors have been trained under so many different legal frameworks (from a monarchical system, to a communist system, to an Islamic sharia system under the Taliban) that most criminal and civil cases are simply handled by tribal elders.

"The counternarcotics law is out of date," says a UN official. "If you are arrested in Helmand, you have to be tried in Helmand, and there is no guarantee of a fair trial. There are no secure prisons to detain people. And yet, you have to start somewhere. Just because things are not perfect doesn't mean you should sit back and say it's hopeless."

For now, Afghanistan's donor countries are beginning the long work of rebuilding the criminal justice system. "If people have a problem, and they don't feel they can go to the court with trust in the result, then the stabilization process will be disrupted," says Jolanda Brunetti, Italy's ambassador to Afghanistan and head of the judicial reform program. "But we are building the judicial process from scratch, and this is a fight that takes a very long time."

• Faye Bowers contributed to this report from Washington.

Second of two parts. Part 1 appeared on Friday, May 13.

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