Just say no to opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan

During Afghanistan's 1979-89 war against the Soviets, drug addiction soared among Afghans and Pakistanis who were exposed to the wartime growth in drug production, which had been encouraged by the CIA to pay for weapons and wages for mujahideen fighters.

The defeated Russians left in 1989. The West abandoned Afghans to tribal warfare and eventual Taliban rule. Though the Taliban banned opium cultivation in 2000 and 2001, it profited by taxing exports of existing opium and morphine-base stockpiles.

Now, as the new internal conflicts gather momentum, former and new warlord allies of the Americans are prospering as drug lords and financing the Taliban and other insurgents.

UN, European, and Afghan sources concur that there is a network of local and senior police and government officials involved in the drug trade. In August, President Hamid Karzai admitted failure of past programs to eradicate poppy farming, the subsistence activity of 80 percent of Afghans. He called the trade Afghanistan's "worst enemy," adding, "If we do not kill opium, it will kill us."

Mr. Karzai announced a new policy to downplay eradication – except where substitution of alternative crops or other "legal livelihoods" are available to farmers – and to emphasize law enforcement and weeding out corrupt officials.

For years, a European think tank, the Senlis Council, has advocated Afghan government licensing of limited opium production for legal medical use under tight government controls. But ethical considerations and pressure from the drug lords have blocked this. In a recent BBC documentary, experts proposed a concerted program, financed by governments, the UN, and NGOs, to buy up and sequester or destroy the opium crop over a period of perhaps five years.

The presumption is that poppy farmers would be obliged to start growing corn, other food grains, sunflowers, or whatever alternative crops they found profitable.

NATO (which has so far shunned the opium issue), its member governments, and EU authorities should now put their heads together in an intensive international effort to find solutions, even if these must come in gradual stages.

The present US administration and future ones should forcefully encourage and follow the phasing out of Afghan drug production, mobilizing those with academic and scientific expertise to advise the Afghan government in this endeavor.

Afghanistan's future depends on saving it from opium and its evils. More than this, eliminating the raw material for heroin and other opium products would keep them off the streets of the world's cities where they have done so much damage. People everywhere would ultimately benefit.

• John K. Cooley, a former Monitor correspondent, wrote "Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism," now in three English-language editions and eight foreign languages.

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