ENDING AN OPIUM WAR

Poppies and Afghan Recovery Can Both Bloom

Once, the British Empire fought a war for the right to sell opium in
China. In retrospect, history has judged that war destructive and
wasteful, a shameless battle of colonizers against the colonized that
in the end helped neither one.

Now, NATO is fighting a war to eradicate opium from Afghanistan.
Allegedly, the goals this time around are different. According to the
British government, Afghanistan's illicit drug trade poses the
"gravest threat to the long term security, development, and effective
governance of Afghanistan," particularly since the Taliban is
believed to be the biggest beneficiary of drug sales. Convinced that
this time they are doing the morally right thing, Western governments
are spending hundreds of millions of dollars bulldozing poppy fields,
building up counternarcotics squads and financing alternative crops
in Afghanistan. Chemical spraying may begin as early as this spring.
But in retrospect, might history not judge this war to be every bit
as destructive and wasteful as the original Opium Wars?

Of course it isn't fashionable right now to argue for any legal form
of opiate cultivation. But look at the evidence. At the moment,
Afghanistan's opium exports account for somewhere between one-third
and two-thirds of the country's gross domestic product, depending on
whose statistics you believe. The biggest producers are in the
southern provinces where the Taliban is at its strongest, and no
wonder: Every time a poppy field is destroyed, a poor person becomes
poorer -- and more likely to support the Taliban against the Western
forces who wrecked his crops. Yet little changes: The amount of land
dedicated to poppy production grew last year by more than 60 percent,
as The Post reported last month.

So central is the problem that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president,
has called opium a "cancer" worse than terrorism -- and crop-spraying
may make things worse. Not only will it cause environmental and
health damage, it will feel to the local population like a military
attack, as Western planes drop poisonous chemicals from the sky.

Yet by far the most depressing aspect of the Afghan poppy crisis is
that it exists at all -- because it doesn't have to. To see what I
mean, look at the history of Turkey, where once upon a time the drug
trade also threatened the country's political and economic stability.
Just like Afghanistan, Turkey had a long tradition of poppy
cultivation. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey worried that poppy
eradication could "bring down the government." Just like Afghanistan,
Turkey -- this was the era of "Midnight Express"-- was identified as
the main source of the heroin sold in the West. Just like in
Afghanistan, a ban was tried, and it failed.

As a result, in 1974 the Turks, with American and U.N. support, tried
a different tactic. They began licensing poppy cultivation for the
purpose of producing morphine, codeine and other legal opiates. Legal
factories were built to replace the illegal ones. Farmers registered
to grow poppies, and they paid taxes. You wouldn't necessarily know
this from the latest White House drug strategy report-- which devotes
several pages to Afghanistan but doesn't mention Turkey -- but the
U.S. government still supports the Turkish program, even requiring
U.S. drug companies to purchase 80 percent of what the legal
documents euphemistically refer to as "narcotic raw materials" from
the two traditional producers, Turkey and India.

Why not add Afghanistan to this list? The only good arguments against
doing so -- as opposed to the silly, politically correct "just say
no" arguments -- are technical: that the same weak or nonexistent
bureaucracy will be no better at licensing poppy fields than it has
been at destroying them, or that some of the raw material will still
fall into the hands of the drug cartels. Yet some of these issues can
be resolved, by building processing factories at the local level and
working within local power structures. And even if the program
succeeds in stopping only half of the drug trade, a huge chunk of
Afghanistan's economy will still emerge from the gray market; the
power of the drug barons will be reduced; and, most important,
Western money will have been visibly spent helping Afghan farmers
survive, instead of destroying their livelihoods. The director of the
Senlis Council, a group that studies the drug problem in Afghanistan,
told me he reckons that the best way to "ensure more Western soldiers
get killed" is to expand poppy eradication.

Besides, things really could get worse. It isn't so hard to imagine,
two or three years down the line, yet another emergency presidential
speech, calling for a "surge" of troops to southern Afghanistan --
where impoverished villagers, having turned against the West, are
joining the Taliban in droves. Before we get there, maybe it's worth
letting some legal poppies bloom.