OPIUM WARS

As NATO braces for a spring Taliban offensive in Afghanistan, many in
the Bush administration, the Congress and the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime are calling for it to take on a prominent role in
combating the narcotics trade.

Although this task is meant to help Afghanistan repress the worrisome,
if predictable, expansion of its opium economy, it will greatly hamper
NATO's effectiveness. NATO's crucial role is to establish security
throughout the country -- and not to dilute its focus in eradication
and interdiction missions that are presently bound to fail. It is not
that NATO should simply turn a blind eye to the opium trade.

But it should focus on where it can make a difference. Success in
counterinsurgency requires the ability to establish a permanent
presence in ever-larger sectors and to consistently protect the
population from insurgent reprisals, thus winning the minds part of
the hearts-and-minds struggle. NATO's troop density in Afghanistan is
still far too low to provide such security, despite the extension of
duty tours for several thousand U.S. soldiers.

Expanding their mission to include drug eradication will only further
thin NATO's presence, while jeopardizing its ability to control areas
and persuade the population that it can protect them from the Taliban.
Without this assurance, the population will at best sit on the fence,
and at worse succumb to Taliban pressure.

Even more important, it will cost NATO the loss of the population's
hearts. The rural population is critically dependent on the opium
economy for a basic livelihood. Without any viable alternatives,
destroying the crop greatly antagonizes the population against those
who carry it out -- local tribal elites, state officials and Kabul.

Drug eradication efforts so far have allowed the Taliban to
reintegrate itself into the opium economy and rebuild some of its
political capital with the population, by offering itself as a
protector of the population and its poppy fields.

Meanwhile, the damage to the crops has generated a new wave of
economic refugees to Pakistan, many of whom have been replenishing the
ranks of the Taliban. There's another critical problem.

Reliable, accurate and actionable human intelligence is the key to
winning a counterinsurgency campaign. The willingness of the
population to provide such intelligence on the Taliban is already
minimal, and NATO's direct participation in eradication will halt it
altogether.

Yes, the Taliban is profiting financially from the Afghan drug trade
(in addition to profiting politically from eradication), but
eradication will not cut off financial resources to the Taliban,
rendering it physically weak and easy to defeat.

The Taliban was able to regroup and rebuild its organization in
Pakistan and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to large
profits from the opium economy, which was at that time dominated by
various warlords, many of whom are now government officials at all
levels of the Afghan government. It was able to replenish its physical
resources by donations from the Middle East and collections in
Pakistan, as well as by participating in other smuggling activities.
In fact, no belligerent group has been bankrupted by the effort to
eradicate drugs.

For example, even after years of fumigation and under pressure from
the Colombian military, the FARC guerilla group is showing no signs of
hurting financially. Eradication will also fail to weaken the Taliban
physically; indeed it will only strengthen them politically, while
undermining NATO's intelligence acquisition.

Participating in interdiction which focuses on apprehending
traffickers and destroying labs is somewhat less problematic for NATO,
but even such a mission is not without crucial problems.

Steadily expanding in Afghanistan since the 1980s (with the 2000
eradication campaign by the Taliban being temporary and
unsustainable), the opium economy deeply underlines much of
Afghanistan's political, economic and social life. The traders and
traffickers are not alien criminals.

Many are members of tribal elites with crucial sway over the
population.

Drug interdiction will at the least induce these traders and
traffickers to pressure the population to stop cooperating with NATO,
if not more directly support the Taliban. This could easily jeopardize
as well the reconstruction and economic functions of the provincial
reconstruction teams, thus further weakening the minimal efforts at
long-term alternative development. Interdiction should be carried out
- -- by special national interdiction units -- to eliminate at least
some corruption and impunity of the key traffickers, but NATO should
stay out of it.

NATO does have an important role to play in counternarcotics --
namely, to defeat the insurgency. Without stability throughout the
country and security on the ground, counternarcotics measures will not
succeed.

Alternative livelihood programs will not have a chance to take off.
Without stability, even repressive measures, such as eradication, will
only lead to cycles of replanting, social strife, and a strengthened
insurgency. Ms. Felbab-Brown is a research fellow at the Brookings
Institution.