INACTION ON POPPY CROPS A DANGER

Taliban Windfall Puts Troops At Risk

OTTAWA -Canadian soldiers escorting me outside a remote Afghan
National Army base last summer didn't give it a second thought as
their boots crunched thousands of dried poppy bulbs sapped of their
narcotic resin.

It was, after all, Kandahar -- now more than ever an incubator for
most of the world's opium supply.

Raked into metre-high piles, the empty pods were the residue of a
largest-ever poppy crop in a country that feeds 92% of the planet's
heroin addictions, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report.

The volume of Afghan poppy sap in 2008 is expected to crest 9,000
tonnes, increasingly concentrated in the southwestern Helmand
province, where British forces dominate, and the Kandahar region
under Canadian military supervision.

The UN estimates opium production from Kandahar alone increased by
more than 300 tonnes last year, even after the province's governor
ploughed under some 8,000 hectares of poppy crop.

Thomas Schweich, the senior U. S. counter-narcotics official posted
to Afghanistan in 2006, wrote an analysis of the country's failing
poppy-eradication strategy in the New York Times magazine last weekend.

It's a disturbing read for Canadians watching their soldier
sacrifices steadily rise to defend a region that has become the
headquarters for a drug trade that ultimately finances the Taliban
insurgency against our troops.

Mr. Schweich warns that without aggressive aerial eradication using a
relatively safe weed killer spread by crop-dusters, poppy production
will continue to escalate in southern Afghanistan, even though
Kandahar is home to the country's wealthiest farmers.

Ironically, the poppy is disappearing from the fields of poorer
northern and eastern provinces as farmers embrace wheat, which offers
a lucrative legal alternative thanks to rising grain prices.

The significance of this trend is in dispelling the fear that foreign
troops destroying poppy crops would starve destitute Afghans into
stampeding to the Taliban side when, in fact, Kandahar farmers could
live well off other crops.

But Mr. Schweich also notes alarming signs that the opium harvest
enjoys the tacit blessing of President Hamid Karzai, whose voter
support is strong in the poppy-growing industry.

He quotes former attorney-general Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a candidate for
the presidency in next year's election who was fired by Mr. Karzai
this year, as confiding there are more than 20 senior Afghan
government officials profiting from narcotics and protected from
prosecution by the President.

For Canada, which has lost 88 soldiers and a diplomat to the fight,
defending what Mr. Schweich describes as a "Narco State" is disquieting.

Yet when Defence Minister Peter MacKay delivered a cautious
assessment of Canada's war effort yesterday, the bumper opium crop
was not among top-of-mind concerns. The drug problem is shrugged off
by his office as the responsibility of British forces in the United
Nations security force.

The closest Canada has come to raising poppy crop objections was by
signing a communique last year registering "concern" at the
"frighteningly new level" of production and agreeing to "support" the
government's fight against poppy cultivation.

That's the rub. There is no comprehensive Afghan fight against the
poppy. When Mr. Karzai promised this year to dispatch two battalions
into southern regions to eradicate 50,000 hectares of poppy growth,
only a fraction of the soldiers showed up, and they destroyed only
1,000 hectares before withdrawing under heavy insurgent fire.

As such, Canada's pledge to join the battle is as empty as the Afghan fight.

Anyone touring rural Afghanistan knows that poppies are as hard to
find in Kandahar as canola fields are on the Prairies, their pink
flowers blanketing river valleys in the spring. And when it's harvest
time, even Afghan police officers join the effort, lured to the
fields by daily wages much higher than their police paycheques.

The solution, argues Mr. Schweich, is an ultimatum for Mr. Karzai to
either unleash an aerial bombardment backed by a zero tolerance
policy for growing the opium poppy or lose United Nations support.

That won't happen, of course, but somehow a vicious circle must be broken.

For political purposes a corrupt Afghan government is protecting an
illegal crop, which then boomerangs back to help finance the Taliban.

For Canadians, that's a growing problem worth fighting. The crunch of
empty bulbs under military foot patrols is the sound of money that's
flowing into enemy hands.