If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them:

THE RADICAL PLAN TO LEGALISE THE OPIUM TRADE

It is a brazen idea. But support is growing for claims that the best
way to attack the Afghan opium crisis is to harness it as a
legitimate supplier to a hungry international pharmaceutical industry.

The argument is that faltering efforts to eradicate opium in
Afghanistan are a misguided waste of billions of dollars.

Between them, the US and British governments have already pledged
$US2 billion to anti-narcotics campaigns here, but much of it leaks
to corruption or is sunk in security and judicial revitalisation
projects that will take years to bear fruit.

The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies
believes money spent on eradication is money wasted.

In a report last week it took a provocative stand: "The bulk of the
$US500 million to be spent on eradication in Helmand and Kandahar in
2007 [should be switched] to alternative solutions, including
purchasing poppy crops at farm gate value ... and to credit-schemes
to enhance substitute livelihood programs and interdiction".

But London and Washington insist that opium cash underpins the
Taliban insurgency and that the flow of funds must be cut - for
security reasons as much as stemming the drug flow to the rest of the world.

Outlining what it called a shared interest between drug traffickers
and the Taliban insurgency to prevent the spread of central
authority, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group argued in a
report last year: "Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in Helmand.

"The site of some of the worst violence of 2006, the province is home
to 42 per cent of the country's total poppy cultivation and the areas
of major drug production and violence show remarkable continuity."

The reality of reconstructing Afghanistan is this: despite billions
in aid since the US-led invasion of 2001, the number of families
turning to drugs has almost doubled, acreages have exploded
exponentially and the eradication of just 10 per cent of last year's
bumper crop failed to deter farmers from what is estimated to be even
greater planting this year.

Village headmen who were asked about the benefits they had received
in the foreign-funded rebuilding of the country, reported
disappointing results to a United Nations survey.

Just over half had received help with health services (54 per cent).
But much smaller numbers had received help in agricultural (18 per
cent) and roads (12 per cent). And virtually none had been assisted
with drinking water, electricity, food, irrigation, jobs or mine clearance.

For now, the villages have the unlikely support of the World Bank.
Instead of targeting opium farmers, it wants to see the trafficking
king-pins take the fall.

"The critical adverse impact of actions against drugs [now] is on
poor farmers and rural wage labourer.

"Any counter-narcotics strategy needs to keep short-run expectations
modest, avoid worsening the situation of the poor and adequately
focus on longer-term rural development."

The most vocal advocate of legalising the Afghan crop is Senlis, a
European NGO that has received many a cold shoulder as it has
undertaken extensive research on bringing Afghanistan's opium farmers
into the legal domain of pharmaceuticals over the last two years.

But the British Medical Association last month backed Senlis, calling
for at least an investigation of legalising Afghan opium; and in
Canada, which has almost 3000 troops in the south of Afghanistan,
there is growing political support.

In the 1970s, Turkey rejected an American demand that poppy farming
be outlawed and eradicated, arguing that it would bring down the
government. Instead, despite deep reservations in Washington, it
legalised the industry which now earns an estimated $US60 million a
year supplying the makings of medical morphine and codeine to the
pharmaceutical industry.

About 600,000 Turks today rely on regulated poppy production for
their income and with only small quantities of Turkish opium being
diverted to the heroin market.

The Americans are aghast at any such proposal for Afghanistan - too
much corruption and the traffickers would always out-bid any
regulated buyers, they say. "In the absence of sophisticated law
enforcement, opium really destined for the black market would be
produced under the pretence of a legal system," the US Bureau of
International Narcotics claimed last week.

The Senlis retort was lost in the ether. Wasn't it better to
legitimate some of the Afghan trade than to see it all dispensed
through syringes in Soho and King's Cross?

And the mere suggestion of legalising the Afghan trade has Turkey and
India, another legal producer, up in arms. They claim that if their
guaranteed share of the legal market is reduced, more of their
harvest would be diverted to the dark side.

Senlis argues that a fatal flaw in the Afghan counter-insurgency is
the treatment, by the Americans in particular, of the Taliban as a
homogenous, jihadist organisation.

In a report last month, it said: "Afghans who are a part of the
insurgency for economic reasons [ie, poppy farmers] ... are targeted
with the blunt instruments of counter insurgency - bombings and fighting.

"No attempt is made to drive a wedge between the hardcore leadership
of the Taliban who do have fundamentalist beliefs and the large group
of Taliban fighters who are involved because of the fact they have to
make a living to feed their families."

The Senlis argument is that widespread civilian casualties in a
foreign-driven war generate civilian disillusionment and protest.
Development is undermined and reconstruction projects are postponed
because of the lack of security - prompting more Afghans to turn
their back on their shaky new government.

Its report claims: "Even after five years ... Afghanistan continues
to face a reconstruction crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Pressure on the Afghan Government to implement untimely and
aggressive eradication-based counter-narcotic policies illustrates a
failure on the part of the international community to recognise that
Afghanistan's opium crisis is not merely a matter of illegal drug
cultivation and production.

"Whether inside or outside Afghanistan, the current insurgency has an
enormous economic advantage - extreme poverty and structural
unemployment [make] it relatively easy to increase both its support
and recruitment base. If we look at what the Taliban fighters are
earning, compared to other professionals, the salary is very high.

"Compared to jobs in the army or in the police force, their pay is
three to four times less."

Washington focus is clear. For eight years, it has been funding a
controversial counter-narcotics campaign in Colombia and recently it
reassigned its Bogota ambassador William Wood to Kabul. Late last
month, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace,
held up the Colombian aerial-spraying campaign as an example for
Afghanistan - despite its questionable outcome.

Afghan traffickers respond by arguing that the problem is in the West
- - if there was no abuse in those countries, production in Afghanistan
would not be the crisis it has become.

A dealer in Helmand resorted to the classic "you people" charge,
telling the Herald: "It's you people that sustain the opium industry
by using heroin - fix it on your end!"

Fair enough. Even the World Bank acknowledges his claim. Warning that
it would take decades to phase out the industry, it pleaded in a
report last year for "an equally smart and effective strategy to
curtail demand for opiates in consuming countries".