IS AFGHANISTAN A NARCO-STATE?

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a
clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and
Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald
Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the
American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior
counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied
90 percent of the world's heroin.

I took to heart Karzai's strong statements against the Afghan drug trade.

That was my first mistake.

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan
government was involved in protecting the opium trade -- by shielding
it from American-designed policies.

While it is true that Karzai's Taliban enemies finance themselves
from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time,
some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as
has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics
as other people's business to be settled once the war-fighting is
over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as
the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs -- and as long as
the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. When I attended an Afghanistan
briefing for Anne Patterson on Dec. 1, 2005, soon after she became
assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and
law-enforcement affairs, she turned to me with her characteristic
smile and said, "What have we gotten ourselves into?" We had just
learned that in the two previous months Afghan farmers had planted
almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of
165,000 hectares (637 square miles). The 2006 harvest would be the
biggest narco-crop in history.

That was the challenge we faced. Patterson -- already a three-time
ambassador -- made me her deputy at the law-enforcement bureau, which
has anti-crime programs in dozens of countries.

At the beginning of 2006, I went to the high-profile London
Conference on Afghanistan. It was a grand event mired in deception,
at least with respect to the drug situation.

Everyone from the Afghan delegation and most in the international
community knew that poppy cultivation and heroin production would
increase significantly in 2006. But the delegates to the London
Conference instead dwelled on the 2005 harvest, which was lower than
that of 2004, principally because of poor weather and market
manipulation by drug lords like Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, who had
been governor of the heroin capital of the world -- Helmand Province
- -- and then a member of Afghanistan's Parliament. So the Afghans
congratulated themselves on their tremendous success in fighting
drugs even as everyone knew the problem was worse than ever.

About three months later, after meeting with local officials in
Helmand -- my helicopter touched down in the middle of a poppy field
- -- I went to the White House to brief Vice President Cheney,
Secretary Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others on the
expanding opium problem.

I advocated a policy replicating what had worked in other countries:
public education about the evils of heroin and the illegality of
cultivating poppies; alternative crops; eradication of poppy fields;
interdiction of drug shipments and arrest of traffickers; and
improvements to the judicial system.

I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication,
although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for
Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the
program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of
poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to
accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential
component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast
Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the
use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But Karzai had long
opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some
sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial
eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose
power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication
was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant
popular backlash.

The chemical used, glyphosate, was a weed killer used all over the
United States, Europe and even Afghanistan. (Drug lords use it in
their gardens in Kabul.) There were volumes of evidence demonstrating
that it was harmless to humans and became inert when it hit the ground.

My assistant at the time was a Georgia farmer, and he told me that
his father mixed glyphosate with his hands before applying it to
their orchards.

Nonetheless, Karzai opposed it, and we at the Bureau of International
Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs went along.

We financed ground-based eradication instead: police using tractors
and weed-whackers to destroy the fields of farmers who refused to
plant alternative crops.

Ground-based eradication was inefficient, costly, dangerous and more
subject to corrupt dealings among local officials than aerial
eradication. But it was our only option.

Yet I continued to press for aerial eradication and a greater
commitment to providing security for eradicators. Rumsfeld was
already in political trouble, so when he started to resist my points,
Rice quickly and easily shut him down. The briefing at the White
House was well received by Rice and the others present.

White House staff members also made clear to me that Bush continued
to be "a big fan of aerial eradication."

The vice president made only one comment: "You got a tough job."

Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne
Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission.
A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt.
Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were
not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson
explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia,
she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance
their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned
Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was
very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but
the Pentagon strategy was "sequencing" -- defeat the Taliban, then
have someone else clean up the drug business.

The Drug Enforcement Administration worked the heroin trafficking and
interdiction effort with the Afghans. They targeted kingpins and
disrupted drug-smuggling networks.

The D.E.A. had excellent agents in Afghanistan, but there were not
enough of them, and they had seemingly unending difficulties getting
Mi-17 helicopters and other equipment that the Pentagon promised for
the training of the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan. In
addition, the Pentagon had reneged on a deal to allow the D.E.A. the
use of precious ramp space at the Kabul airport.

Consequently, the effort to interdict drug shipments and arrest
traffickers had stalled.

Less than 1 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan was being
seized there.

The effort became even more complicated later in 2006, when Benjamin
Freakley, the two-star U.S. general who ran the eastern front, shut
down all operations by the D.E.A. and Afghan counternarcotics police
in Nangarhar -- a key heroin-trafficking province.

The general said that antidrug operations were an unnecessary
obstacle to his military operations.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAid) was
also under fire -- particularly from Congress -- for not providing
better alternative crops for farmers.

USAid had distributed seed and fertilizer to most of Afghanistan, but
more comprehensive agricultural programs were slow to start in parts
of the country.

The USAid officers in Kabul were competent and committed, but they
had already lost several workers to insurgent attacks, and were
understandably reluctant to go into Taliban territory to implement
their programs.

The Department of Justice had just completed an effort to open the
Afghan anti-narcotics court, so capacity to prosecute was initially
low. Justice in Afghanistan was administered unevenly by tribes,
religious leaders and poorly paid, highly corruptible judges.

In the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they
often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked
out the back door. We received dozens of reports to this effect.

And then there was the problem of the Afghan National Police. The
Pentagon frequently proclaimed that the Afghan National Army (which
the Pentagon trained) was performing wonderfully, but that the police
(trained mainly by the Germans and the State Department) were not. A
respected American general in Afghanistan, however, confided to me
that the army was not doing well, either; that the original plan for
training the army was flimsy and underfinanced; and that,
consequently, they were using police to fill holes in the army
mission. Thrust into a military role, unprepared police lost their
lives trying to hold territory in dangerous areas.

There was no coherent strategy to resolve these issues among the U.S.
agencies and the Afghan government. When I asked career officers at
the State Department for the interagency strategy for Afghan
counternarcotics, they produced the same charts I used to brief the
cabinet in Washington months before. "There is no written strategy,"
they confessed.

As big as these challenges were, there were even bigger ones. A lot
of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss
here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved
in the narcotics trade.

Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges
and other officials.

Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The
attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a
self-described "jihad against corruption," told me and other American
officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials
who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade.

He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him,
for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July
16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his
candidacy for president. Karzai's office said Sabit's candidacy
violated laws against political activity by officials.

Sabit told a press conference that Karzai "has never been able to
tolerate rivals."

A nearly equal challenge in 2006 was the lack of resolve in the
international community.

Although Britain's foreign office strongly backed antinarcotics
efforts (with the exception of aerial eradication), the British
military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military.

British forces -- centered in Helmand -- actually issued leaflets and
bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the
British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort.

I had to fly to Brussels and show one of these leaflets to the
supreme allied commander in Europe, who oversees Afghan operations
for NATO, to have this counterproductive information campaign stopped.

It was a small victory; the truth was that many of our allies in the
International Security Assistance Force were lukewarm on antidrug
operations, and most were openly hostile to aerial eradication.

Nonetheless, throughout 2006 and into 2007 there were positive
developments (although the Pentagon did not supply the helicopters to
the D.E.A. until early 2008). The D.E.A. was training special Afghan
narcotics units, while the Pentagon began to train Afghan pilots for
drug operations. We put together educational teams that convened
effective antidrug meetings in the more stable northern provinces.

We used manual eradication to eliminate about 10 percent of the crop.
In some provinces with little insurgent activity, the eradication
numbers reached the 20 percent threshold -- a level that drug experts
see as a tipping point in eradication -- and poppy cultivation all
but disappeared in those areas by 2007. And the Department of Justice
got the counternarcotics tribunal to process hundreds of midlevel cases.

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some
successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent
in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the
country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were
the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan -- those who lived
in the north, east and center of the country -- were taking advantage
of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large
numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the
Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money --
just as Patterson predicted.

In late January 2007, there was an urgent U.S. cabinet meeting to
discuss the situation.

The attendees agreed that the deputy secretary of state John
Negroponte and John Walters, the drug czar, would oversee the
development of the first interagency counternarcotics strategy for
Afghanistan. They asked me to coordinate the effort, and, after
Patterson's intervention, I was promoted to ambassadorial rank. We
began the effort with a briefing for Negroponte, Walters, Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales and several senior Pentagon officials. We
displayed a map showing how poppy cultivation was becoming limited to
the south, more associated with the insurgency and disassociated from poverty.

The Pentagon chafed at the briefing because it reflected a new
reality: narcotics were becoming less a problem of humanitarian
assistance and more a problem of insurgency and war.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime was arriving at the same
conclusion. Later that year, they issued a report linking the drug
trade to the insurgency and made a controversial statement: "Opium
cultivation in Afghanistan is no longer associated with poverty --
quite the opposite." The office convincingly demonstrated that poor
farmers were abandoning the crop and that poppy growth was largely
confined to some of the wealthiest parts of Afghanistan. The report
recommended that eradication efforts be pursued "more honestly and
more vigorously," along with stronger anticorruption measures.
Earlier this year, the U.N. published an even more detailed paper
titled "Is Poverty Driving the Afghan Opium Boom?" It rejected the
idea that farmers would starve without the poppy, concluding that
"poverty does not appear to have been the main driving factor in the
expansion of opium poppy cultivation in recent years."

The U.N. reports shattered the myth that poppies are grown by
destitute farmers who have no other source of income.

They demonstrated that approximately 80 percent of the land under
poppy cultivation in the south had been planted with it only in the
last two years.

It was not a matter of "tradition," and these farmers did not need an
alternative livelihood. They had abandoned their previous livelihoods
- -- mainly vegetables, cotton and wheat (which was in severely short
supply) -- to take advantage of the security vacuum to grow a more
profitable crop: opium.

Around the same time, the United States released photos of
industrial-size poppy farms -- many owned by pro-government
opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers. Most of these
narco-farms were near major southern cities.

Farmers were digging wells, surveying new land for poppy cultivation,
diverting U.S.-built irrigation canals to poppy fields and starting
expensive reclamation projects.

Yet Afghan officials continued to say that poppy cultivation was the
only choice for its poor farmers.

My first indication of the insincerity of this position came at a
lunch in Brussels in September 2006 attended by Habibullah Qaderi,
who was then Afghanistan's minister for counternarcotics. He gave a
speech in which he said that poor Afghan farmers have no choice but
to grow poppies, and asked for more money.

A top European diplomat challenged him, holding up a U.N. map showing
the recent trend: poppy growth decreasing in the poorest areas and
growing in the wealthier areas.

The minister, taken aback, simply reiterated his earlier point that
Afghanistan needed more money for its destitute farmers.

After the lunch, however, Qaderi approached me and whispered: "I know
what you say is right. Poverty is not the main reason people are
growing poppy. But this is what the president of Afghanistan tells me
to tell others."

In July 2007, I briefed President Karzai on the drive for a new
strategy. He was interested in the new incentives that we were
developing, but became sullen and unresponsive when I discussed the
need to balance those incentives with new disincentives -- including
arrests of high-level traffickers and eradication of poppy fields in
the wealthier areas of the Pashtun south, where Karzai had his roots
and power base.

We also tried to let the public know about the changing dynamics of the trade.

Unfortunately, most media outlets clung to the myth that the problem
was out of control all over the country, that only desperate farmers
grew poppies and that any serious law-enforcement effort would drive
them into the hands of the Taliban. The "starving farmer" was a
convenient myth. It allowed some European governments to avoid
involvement with the antidrug effort.

Many of these countries had only one-or two-year legislative mandates
to be in Afghanistan, so they wanted to avoid any uptick in violence
that would most likely result from an aggressive strategy, even if
the strategy would result in long-term success.

The myth gave military officers a reason to stay out of the drug war,
while prominent Democrats used the myth to attack Bush administration policies.

And the Taliban loved it because their propaganda campaign consisted
of trotting out farmers whose fields had been eradicated and having
them say that they were going to starve.

An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt
Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats
and the Taliban were preventing the implementation of an effective
counterdrug program.

And the rest of us could not turn them around.

Nonetheless, we stayed hopeful as we worked on what became the U.S.
Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan. The Defense Department was
initially cooperative (as I testified to Congress). We agreed to
expand the local meetings and education campaign that worked well in the north.

Afghan religious leaders would issue anti-poppy statements, focusing
on the anti-Islamic nature of drugs and the increasing addiction rate
in Afghanistan. In the area of agricultural incentives, since most
farmers already had an alternative crop, we agreed to improve access
to markets not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and the wider region.

USAid would establish more cold-storage facilities, build roads and
establish buying cooperatives that could guarantee prices for legal crops.

With the British, we developed an initiative to reward provinces that
became poppy-free or reduced their poppy crop by a specified amount.
Governors who performed well would get development projects: schools,
bridges and hospitals.

But there had to be disincentives too. We agreed to provide security
for manual poppy eradication, so that we could show the Afghan people
that the more-powerful farmers were vulnerable. We focused on
achieving better ground-based eradication, but reintroduced the
possibility of aerial eradication. We agreed to increase D.E.A.
training of counternarcotics police and establish special
investigative units to gather physical and documentary evidence
against corrupt Afghan officials.

And we developed policies that would increase the Afghan capacity to
prosecute traffickers.

Adding to the wave of optimism was the arrival of William Wood as the
new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He had been ambassador in
Colombia, so he understood drugs and insurgency well. His view was
that poppy cultivation was illegal in Afghanistan, so he didn't
really care whether the farmers were poor or rich. "We have a lot of
poor people in the drug trade in the U.S.A. -- people mixing meth in
their trailers in rural areas and people selling crack in the inner
cities -- and we put them in jail," he said.

At first Wood advocated -- in an unclassified e-mail message,
surprisingly -- a massive aerial-eradication program that would wipe
out 80,000 hectares of poppies in Helmand Province, delivering a
fatal blow to the root of the narcotics problem. "If there is no
poppy, there is nothing to traffic," Wood said. The plan looked good
on paper, but we knew it would be impossible to sell to Karzai and
the Pentagon. Wood eventually agreed to language advocating, at a
minimum, force-protected ground-based eradication with the
possibility of limited aerial eradication.

Another ally for a more aggressive approach to the problem was David
Kilcullen, a blunt counterterrorism expert.

He became increasingly concerned about the drug money flowing to the
Taliban. He noted that, while Afghans often shift alliances, what
remains constant is their respect for strength and consistency. He
recommended mobile courts that had the authority to execute drug
kingpins in their own provinces. (You could have heard a pin drop
when he first made that suggestion at a large meeting of diplomats.)
In support of aerial eradication, Kilcullen pointed out that, with
manual eradication you have to "fight your way in and fight your way
out" of the poppy fields, making it deadly, inefficient and subject
to corrupt bargaining. Aerial eradication, by contrast, is quick,
fair and efficient. "If we are already bombing Taliban positions, why
won't we spray their fields with a harmless herbicide and cut off
their money?" Kilcullen asked.

So it appeared that things were moving nicely.

We were going to increase incentives to farmers and politicians while
also increasing the disincentives with aggressive eradication and
arrest of criminal officials and leading traffickers. The Pentagon
seemed on board.

Then it all began to unravel.

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at
the National Security Council, in order to ensure the strategy paper
would be executed, decided to take it to the Deputies Committee -- a
group of cabinet deputy secretaries led by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute,
whom President Bush had appointed his "war czar" -- which had the
power to make the document official U.S. policy.

Harriman asked me to start developing an unclassified version for
public release.

Almost immediately, the Pentagon bureaucracy -- particularly the
South Asia office -- made an about-face. First, they resisted
bringing the paper to the deputies.

When that effort failed (largely because of unexpected support for
the plan from new field commanders like Gen. Dan McNeill, who saw the
narcotics-insurgency nexus and were willing to buck their Pentagon
minders), the Pentagon bureaucrats tried to prevent the release of an
unclassified version to the public.

Indeed, two senior Pentagon officials threatened me with professional
retaliation if we made the unclassified document public. When we went
ahead anyway, the Pentagon leaked the contents of the classified
version to Peter Gilchrist, a British general posted in Washington.
Defense Department officials were thus enlisting a foreign government
to help kill U.S. policy -- a policy that implicitly recognized that
the Pentagon's "sequencing" approach had failed and that the Defense
Department would have to get more involved in fighting the narcotics trade.

Gilchrist told me that the plan was unacceptable to Britain. Britain,
apparently joined by Sweden (which has fewer than 500 troops in a
part of the country where there is no poppy cultivation), sent
letters to Karzai urging him to reject key elements of the U.S. plan.
By the time Wood and Secretary Rice pressed Karzai for more
aggressive action, Karzai told Rice that because some people in the
U.S. government did not support the plan, and some allies did not
support it, he was not going to support it, either.

An operations-center assistant, who summarized the call for me over
my car phone just after it occurred, made an uncharacteristic
editorial comment: "It was not a good call, ambassador."

Even more startling, it appeared that top Pentagon officials knew
nothing about the changing nature of the drug problem or about the
new plan. When, through a back channel, I briefed the under secretary
of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, on the relationship
between drugs and the insurgency, he said he had "never heard any of
this." Worse still, Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to
Congress in December 2007 that we did not have a strategy for
fighting drugs in Afghanistan. I received a quick apology from the
Pentagon counterdrugs unit, which sent a memo to Gates informing him
that we actually did have a strategy.

This dissension was, I believe, music to Karzai's ears. When he
convened all 34 Afghan provincial governors in Kabul in September
2007 (I was a "guest of honor"), he made antidrug statements at the
beginning of his speech, but then lashed out at the international
community for wanting to spray his people's crops and giving him
conflicting advice.

He got a wild ovation.

Not surprising -- since so many in the room were closely tied to the
narcotics trade.

Sure, Karzai had Taliban enemies who profited from drugs, but he had
even more supporters who did.

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of
dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would
fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get rich off the drug
trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would
be elected to a new term.

This is not just speculation, even when you stick with unclassified
materials. In September 2007, The Kabul Weekly, an independent
newspaper, ran a blunt editorial laying out the issue: "It is obvious
that the Afghan government is more than kind to poppy growers. . . .
[It] opposes the American proposal for political reasons.

The administration believes that it will lose popularity in the
southern provinces where the majority of opium is cultivated. They're
afraid of losing votes.

More than 95 percent of the residents of . . . the poppy growing
provinces -- voted for President Karzai." The editorial recommended
aerial eradication. That same week, the first vice president of
Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, wrote a scathing op-ed article in The
Sunday Telegraph in London: "Millions of pounds have been committed
in provinces including Helmand Province for irrigation projects and
road building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for
now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport
opium. . . . Deep-rooted corruption . . . exists in our state
institutions." The Afghan vice president concluded, "We must switch
from ground-based eradication to aerial spraying."

But Karzai did not care. Back in January 2007, Karzai appointed a
convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption
commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police
chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed
Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug
trade. (Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States,
said Karzai has "taken the step of issuing a decree asking the
government to be vigilant of any business dealing involving his
family, and requesting that any suspicions be fully investigated.")
Some governors of Helmand and other provinces -- Pashtuns who had
advocated aerial eradication -- changed their positions after the
"palace" spoke to them. Karzai was lining up his Pashtun allies for
re-election, and the drug war was going to have to wait. "Maybe we
taught him too much about politics," Rice said to me after I briefed
her on these developments.

Karzai then put General Khodaidad (who, like many Afghans, goes by
only one name) in charge of the Afghan counternarcotics efforts.
Khodaidad -- a conscientious man, competent and apparently not
corrupt -- was a Hazara. The Hazaras had no influence over the
southern Pashtuns who were dominating the drug trade.

While Khodaidad did well in the north, he got nowhere in Helmand and
Kandahar -- and told me so. Karzai had to have known this would be the case.

But the real test for the Afghan government and the Pentagon came
with the "force protection" issue.

At high-level international conferences, the Afghans -- finally,
under European pressure -- agreed to eradicate 50,000 hectares (more
than 25 percent of the crop) in the first months of this year; and
they agreed that the Afghan National Army would provide force protection.

The plan was simple.

The Afghan Poppy Eradication Force would go to Helmand Province with
two battalions of the national army and eradicate the fields of the
wealthier farmers -- including fields owned by local officials.

Protecting the eradication force would also enable the arrest of key
traffickers. The U.S. military, which trained the Afghan army, would
assist in moving the soldiers there and provide outer-perimeter security.

The U.S. military would not participate directly in eradication or
arrest operations; it would only enable them.

But once again, Karzai and his Pentagon friends thwarted the plan.
First, Anthony Harriman was replaced at the National Security Council
by a colonel who held the old-school Pentagon view that "we don't do
the drug thing." He would not let me see General Lute or Stephen J.
Hadley, the national security adviser, when the force-protection
plans failed to materialize. We asked numerous Pentagon officials to
lobby the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, for immediate force
protection, but they did little.

Consequently, in late March, the central eradication force set out
for Helmand without the promised Afghan National Army. Almost
immediately, they came under withering attack for several days --
107-millimeter rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, machine-gun fire
and mortars.

Three members of the Afghan force were killed and several were
seriously wounded.

They eradicated just over 1,000 hectares, about 1 percent of the
Helmand crop, before withdrawing to Kabul.

This spring, more U.S. troops arrived in Afghanistan. They were
effective, experienced warriors -- many coming from Iraq -- but they
knew little about drugs.

When they arrived in southern Afghanistan, they announced that they
would not interfere with poppy harvesting in the area. "Not our job,"
they said. Despite the wheat shortage and the threat of starvation,
they gave interviews saying that the farmers had no choice but to grow poppies.

At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan.
Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only
permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash
stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment
for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If
you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies
again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative
crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug
experts call this type of offer a "perverse incentive," and it has
never worked anywhere in the world.

It was not going to work in eastern Afghanistan, either.

Farmers were lining up to have their crops eradicated and get the money.

On May 12, at a press conference in Kabul, General Khodaidad declared
the 2008 anti-poppy effort in southern Afghanistan to be a failure.
Eradication this year would total less than a third of the 20,000
hectares that Afghanistan eradicated in 2007. The north and east --
particularly Balkh, Badakhshan and Nangarhar provinces -- continued
to improve because of strong political will and better
civilian-military cooperation. But the base of the Karzai government
- -- Kandahar and Helmand -- would have record crops, less eradication
and fewer arrests than in years past. And the Taliban would get stronger.

Despite this development, the Afghans were busily putting together an
optimistic assessment of their progress for the Paris Conference on
Afghanistan -- where, on June 12, world leaders, including Karzai,
met in an event reminiscent of the London Conference of 2006. In
Paris, the Afghan government raised more than $20 billion in
additional development assistance. But the drug problem was a
nuisance that could jeopardize the financing effort.

So drugs were eliminated from the formal agenda and relegated to a
50-minute closed discussion at a lower-level meeting the week before
the conference.

That is where we are today.

The solution remains a simple one: execute the policy developed in
2007. It requires the following steps:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords
and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support.

Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy
cultivation during the coming growing season.

He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today's high
wheat prices.

Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected
manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar
Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy.

Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security
pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords.

Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of
eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.

3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the
Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt
government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.

4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become
poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant
rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts.

Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.

5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let
us do the job.

There are other initiatives that could help as well: better
engagement of Afghanistan's neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in
Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor
chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction
programs. But if we -- the Afghans and the U.S. -- do just the five
items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless
country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban.