BUSH ADMINISTRATION CUTS FAUSTIAN DEAL WITH TALIBAN

This piece originally appeared in the Tribune on May 30.

Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists and destroy
every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush
administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up
as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this
nation still takes seriously.

That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the
Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American
violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced two
weeks ago by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other
recent aid, makes the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban
and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is
against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are
most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this
administration's attention.

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading
anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from
which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American
embassies in Africa in 1998.

Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at
a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions
on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over bin
Laden.

The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily
trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the
Taliban, who have subjected the female half of the Afghan population
to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered
enlightened in its treatment of women?

At no point in modern history have women and girls been more
systematically abused than in Afghanistan, where in the name of
madness masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates
their fundamental human rights. Women may not appear in public
without being covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud
called the burkha, and they may not leave the house without being
accompanied by a male family member. They've not been permitted to
attend school or be treated by male doctors, yet women have been
banned from practicing medicine or any profession, for that matter.

The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an
extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing
all behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is
this last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White
House.

The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are
at the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy
and cash from the Bush administration, they have been willing to
appear to reverse themselves on the growing of opium.

That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers
is not surprising. But it is grotesque for a U.S. official, James P.
Callahan, director of the Department of State's Asian anti-drug
program, to describe the Taliban's special methods in the language of
representative democracy: "The Taliban used a system of
consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban,
adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious
terms."

Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the
theocratic edict would be sent to prison.

In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on
the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's
understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be
compelling.

Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the farmers who
grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because the
Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the
Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated
quick cash crop overwhelming.

For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the United States
is willing to pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the
Afghan economy.

As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted,
"The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country - or
certain regions of their country - to economic ruin." Nor did he hold
out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat,
which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer
that no longer exists in that devastated country. There's little
doubt that the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash
crop of opium in order to stay in power.

The Taliban might suddenly be the dream regime of our own drug-war
zealots, but in the end this alliance will prove a costly failure.

Our long, sad history of signing up dictators in the war on drugs
demonstrates the futility of building a foreign policy on a domestic
obsession.