STATE OF THE AFGHAN NATION

Opium

With its economy in shambles, Afghanistan ranks near the bottom on
almost every international indicator of human and economic
development. In one sector, though, it leads the world, setting
records year after year. Unfortunately, that sector is the heroin
trade. Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world's opium.

As well as supplying addicts around the globe--causing an estimated
100,000 deaths a year -- the industry has fuelled corruption and
instability at home, and bankrolled the Taliban insurgency.

"Opium production has reached a frightening new level, twice the
amount produced just two years ago," the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC) noted recently in its latest report on the
situation.

That poppy boom brought $4-billion to Afghanistan this year, more than
half the country's legitimate GDP.

The consequences are far-reaching. A "metastases" of dirty money funds
everything from capital investment to expensive foreign imports,
bribes of civil servants and even weddings and funerals, the report
notes.

"The government's benign tolerance of corruption is undermining the
future: no country has ever built prosperity on crime."

The trade also has a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban. For
keeping poppy fields safe from authorities, and protecting drug labs
and smuggling convoys, the insurgents earn about $10-million annually,
by one estimate.

And yet, there are positive developments that hint at a solution.
Seven provinces moved out of opium production this year, bringing the
poppy-free total to 13 provinces, and leaving production concentrated
mostly in the more lawless south.

The possible solutions run the gamut. The European Union has endorsed
a proposal to set up an industry to produce legal opiates for the
medical market. American officials have been pushing chemical spraying
of poppy fields, though critics warn of a backlash among Afghans.

The UNODC urges a multi-pronged approach: increasing the "abysmally
low" financial support paid farmers to grow other crops, using NATO
military might to curb the flow of precursor chemicals in and opium or
heroin out of Afghanistan, and crop eradication that is done fairly.