LET'S BUY AFGHANISTAN'S POPPIES

At home, the red European wild poppy is a symbol of Canada's military
heritage. But the Canadian soldiers of today are trudging through
fields of opium poppies every day in Afghanistan, and for them, the
potent tall-stalked plant has become a contemporary symbol of the
frustrations of nation-building in a failed state.

Illicit poppy production is simultaneously a hard-to-replace source
of income for thousands of small Afghan farmers and a valuable source
of revenue for the enemies of NATO and the legitimate Afghan
government. Over 90% of the world's illegal raw opium is thought to
come from Afghanistan. Ultimately, its by-products go on to wreak
havoc in cities around the world.

Consistent with the thinking that gave us Washington's failed "war on
drugs," the preferred U.S. policy is to "eradicate" Afghan poppy
fields through aerial spraying, which practically means driving the
opium trade underground and hitting the small grow-ops hardest.

Other NATO partners such as Germany credibly argue that crippling
Afghanistan's underground economy is only going to destabilize the
country, and thereby strengthen Taliban rebels.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Karzai is caught in a difficult bind,
since many of the regional power-brokers on whom he depends have a
hand in heroin smuggling. While he has warned that the illicit drug
trade may "destroy" Afghanistan, the President is reluctant to
consent to a program of aerial spraying that will destroy the
livelihoods of impoverished farmers.

For now, NATO troops' formal rules of engagement have them turning a
blind eye to poppy production while the Afghan government's own
eradication teams, working with American training and equipment, try
to reduce the opium supply. Mr. Karzai has agreed to allow the United
States to begin spraying if the Afghans don't get the job done by
next spring. It is an approach guaranteed to fail: Similar
U.S.-funded scorched-earth drug-eradication projects in Columbia and
other Latin American countries have all been complete debacles in
recent decades.

Given this, it's worth taking a look at a course of action being
promoted in Canada by the Senlis Council, a liberal-minded,
self-described "international drug policy think-tank." In recent
years, its members' close attention to Afghanistan's drug trade has
encouraged them to speak out on broader issues concerning the war there.

We are philosophically opposed to some favoured Senlis policies, like
safe-injection sites for heroin addicts, and we admittedly can't see
much logic behind its recent urgings that Canadian development aid
for Afghanistan should match military spending there
dollar-for-dollar. (The stick and the carrot should be as big as they
need to be to get the job done, whatever their respective sizes.) But
the organization's Canadian president, Norine MacDonald, knows
Afghanistan intimately, sensibly opposes a Stephane Dion-style
scheduled military withdrawal and has a tempting answer for the opium
paradox that both drug warriors and harm reductionists could get
behind in principle.

The basic idea is simple: Opium is medicine, so why destroy it? In an
age of rising global prosperity and life expectancies, the medical
demand for opioids such as codeine and morphine is rising all the
time, and indeed is outstripping supply according to UN measures. Yet
there are no legal arrangements for Afghan farmers to produce
licensed opium legally for the international pharmaceutical market.

Nothing in international, Afghan or Islamic law stands in the way,
and a similar program of pharmacization has already brought thousands
of Turkish farmers in from the black market. The only thing missing
in Afghanistan is the bridge between lawful authority and the areas
in which poppies are now being grown illegally -- which is to say,
the problem is that the war hasn't yet been won.

That's hardly a trivial hurdle to overcome, but there is a
chicken-and-egg dynamic here: Isn't it just possible that NATO would
find it easier to win hearts and minds in the lawless parts of
Afghanistan if farmers there knew that NATO progress meant a big
stake in a legal opium trade -- instead of the status quo, whereby
government busybodies are trying to get everybody to burn their
dollars-a-bushel poppies and grow pennies-a-bushel onions instead?

The real risk of a licensing regime is that it might end up being
carelessly policed and prone to bribery, enabling some of the "legal"
harvest to find its way into the illicit drug trade. But as the
Council points out, that's where the entire harvest is ending up now.

Stephane Dion has come out in favour of looking at the Senlis plan,
but when he notices that it implies seeing the war through to the
end, as Ms. MacDonald has emphasized, he is likely to get cold feet.
It's the Conservatives, the party of victory, that ought to give it
the consideration it deserves.