MANLEY REPORT IGNORED THE AFGHAN DRUG DILEMMA

So it's official. Afghanistan's vast fields of opium poppy will soon
be entirely wiped out. No more opium and heroin. Just melons and happy
farmers, as far as the eye can see.

Granted, the reader may have heard otherwise. The latest opium crop
was the biggest ever, the headlines reported. Ninety per cent of the
world's heroin supply comes from Afghanistan. Top officials from NATO
commanders to President Hamid Karzai have said the illicit drug trade
is so enormous and corrosive that it is a bigger threat to the future
of Afghanistan than the Taliban.

But that can't be true. Just look at the report of the Independent
Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan.

The report acknowledges that opium poppy is "a complicating factor."
But in its 94 pages, it devotes precisely one paragraph to the issue.
John Manley's panel believes the drug trade isn't a terribly important
part of the equation.

Those who wish to bring peace and development to Afghanistan face an
insoluble dilemma. On the one hand, the poppy industry is the
country's largest. Afghanistan is horribly poor now, but removing the
income from the poppy industry would make vast numbers of very poor
people very much poorer. This is why most NATO officers are adamantly
opposed to taking aggressive action against poppy production: It would
drive every small farmer, field hand and trader into the arms of the
insurgents.

It would also be futile. Any reduction in the poppy crop would cause
prices to rise along the entire supply chain -- from farm field to
street retailer. Rising prices would draw farmers and traffickers back
into the trade.

The tempting conclusion is that we should simply turn a blind eye. But
that's not an option, either. The money the Taliban make "taxing"
farmers and traffickers pays for wages, weapons and bombs. And the
industry is a fountainhead of corruption.

"Military victories will count for little unless the Afghan
government, with the help of others, can improve governance and
provide better living conditions for the Afghan people," the Manley
report correctly noted.

But how can the Afghan government do that? It's impossible if it
doesn't tackle the opium industry. And if it does, the government will
turn the people against it.

It's a heck of a dilemma. What's the Manley report got to say about
it?

Nothing, really. "Coherent counter-narcotics strategies need to be
adopted by all relevant authorities," it says without noting what
those strategies might be.

There should also be "effective economic provisions to induce would-be
poppy farmers and middlemen to prefer and find alternative lines of
work." The report also suggests that "a limited poppies-for-medicine
project might be worth pursuing."

The objections to these ideas are obvious. First, the profitability
gap between poppy and legal crops is enormous, so economic incentives
to encourage farmers and middlemen to switch would have to be equally
enormous. Even if they are, they are self-defeating: If farmers start
abandoning poppies in substantial numbers, poppy prices will rise and
those rising prices will eventually drag farmers right back in.

Poppies-for-medicine is a mistake for the same reason: If substantial
quantities of poppy are diverted from the illegal trade to the legal
market, prices for black-market poppy will rise and illegal production
will respond accordingly. The laws of economics will not be denied.

So how does the Manley report respond to these objections? It
doesn't.

To use a hackneyed phrase, the Manley report is inside-the-box
thinking. Here, the box is the criminalization of opium poppy.

It was criminalization that turned a crop that has been grown
peacefully in central Asia since time immemorial into a source of
instability and corruption. It was criminalization that helped create
the dilemma Afghanistan finds itself in now.

But the Manley report doesn't consider that criminalization is a
policy choice made almost a century ago by foolish people who had no
idea what hell they were unleashing. It treats criminalization as a
law of nature, like gravity -- something that has always existed and
always will. That's even more foolish than the decision to criminalize
in the first place.

We choose our drug policies. And the choice of criminalization has
created an insoluble dilemma in Afghanistan, one that is killing
Canadian soldiers.

The Manley report could have identified the Afghan dilemma squarely.
It could have shown how international drug policy helped create that
dilemma. It could have called on the Canadian government to work with
European governments and others disenchanted with the war on drugs to
turn the UN's 2008 review into a serious re-examination of drug policy.

It could have challenged us all to think.

But it didn't. It just hunkered down in that damned old box and closed
the lid.