LET POPPIES BE, EX-AMBASSADOR SAYS

Afghan Trade Can Help Alleviate Worldwide Morphine Shortages, Former MP Says

An international marketing board for opium, similar to Canada's wheat
board, would be better off fighting terrorism and the booming drug
trade in Afghanistan instead of current poppy-eradication programs, a
former NATO ambassador says.

Destroying poppy crops, a major plank of U.S. and British anti-drug
policy, only drives farmers closer toward the Taliban, said Gordon
Smith, Canada's NATO ambassador between 1985 and 1990. He's the lead
author of a report published yesterday that urges the continuation of
Canada's military presence beyond the current 2009 deadline, but also
says current NATO policies need a shakeup.

His study, prepared for the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and
Foreign Affairs Institute, urged the creation of an international
clearing house to purchase opium crops and prevent money from
entering the hands of Taliban insurgents or traffickers.

Afghanistan remains the largest heroin producing and trafficking
country, producing more than 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy
supply in 2006. That's 172,000 hectares, according to recent U.S.
estimates - a 61-per-cent jump from the previous year. Opium exports
account for one-third of the country's combined lawful and illicit
GDP, according to the United Nations.

"In a perfect world, nobody would be allowed to grow poppies and all
would be well," Smith said yesterday. "It would never be leak-proof.
It's not a frightfully good option, but it's better than any others
that anyone else has come forward with."

Fair opium prices and central regulation by the Afghan government and
foreign states would help alleviate international morphine shortages,
said Smith, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and now the
executive director of the University of Victoria's Centre for Global Studies.

Poppy cultivation remains the only lucrative career choice for many
impoverished Afghans, living under the burden of three continuous
decades of civil war.

But strong links exist between Afghanistan's burgeoning narco-economy
and the Taliban insurgence against NATO and Afghan forces, according
to a U.S. State Department report also released yesterday.

Barnett Rubin, a former UN adviser on Afghanistan, argued in 2003
that the marketing board concept would represent disaster for small
Afghan farmers, keeping prices low along the lines of African coffee,
tea, and, cocoa boards. An auction house in Kabul, with sales taxed
by the central government, represented a better idea, said Rubin, a
New York University professor.

Pakistan arrested a former Taliban defence minister regarded as a top
figure in the Afghan insurgency, a Pakistani intelligence official said today.

Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, considered a key associate of fugitive
Taliban leader Mullah Omar, is the most senior leader from the
hardline militia to be arrested since U.S.-led troops ousted it from
power in 2001.

Akhund was among five Taliban suspects arrested in a raid on a home
in the southwestern city of Quetta this week, said the official, who
requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to journalists.

In an interview with an Al-Jazeera TV journalist last week, another
top militant commander, Mullah Dadullah, claimed he had deployed more
than 6,000 fighters for a spring offensive. He said the fighters were
hidden in tunnels and elsewhere in preparation for the assault.