DION IS RIGHT: IT'S TIME TO TRY BACKING AFGHAN POPPY INDUSTRY

At last -- some common sense is being brought to the debate about
poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, thanks to the Liberal party.

In a speech Thursday at the University of Montreal, Liberal leader
Stephane Dion outlined his party's position on Canada's military role
in the impoverished, war-ravaged nation.

Sensibly, he advocated that Canada set a 2009 deadline for its NATO
participation, after which another of the 26 member states can take
over. He called for Canada to focus more on reconstruction and
training, to enable the Afghans to run the show.

Dion also echoed an endorsement last week by deputy leader Michael
Ignatieff of the Senlis Council's proposal for a pilot project to
test a highly controversial initiative -- nurturing a legitimate
industry from poppy fields that traditionally have supplied the
illegal global opium trade and, in the process, given economic
sustenance to Afghan farmers.

At present, when it comes to poppy production -- an enterprise
accounting for a stunning 60 per cent of Afghanistan's GDP -- NATO's
entire focus is on eradicating the crop.

The council -- an international policy think-tank with offices in the
Afghan cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Helmand, several European
capitals and, just recently, Ottawa -- has for some time been saying
that poppy eradication negatively affects support for NATO. It argues
that, instead of winning hearts and minds, poppy culls are fuelling
the insurgency.

This isn't a far-fetched analysis. If NATO troops are taking away the
only economic option many Afghans have, why would they be supportive?

Desperate people are less interested in democracy than in feeding
their families. Afghans are so desperate some four million have
become refugees in Iran and Pakistan.

The country of 25 million has a 36-per-cent literacy rate.
Unemployment runs at 40 per cent.

It's not as though near-term prospects for developing high-tech or
tourism industries are promising. Who would invest where there's so
much violence and infrastructure gaps are overwhelming?

Poppy-growing is what Afghans know. Climate and soil conditions are
right. Other crops? A quarter-century of war has left farm
infrastructure such as grain silos and sugar mills in ruins.

As Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Harvard University researcher, wrote last
March in the Christian Science Monitor, "the success in curbing drug
production in Afghanistan has thus come at the price of undermining
state-building and empowering the insurgency."

Meanwhile, the Senlis Council notes that the World Health
Organization has cited an unprecedented global pain crisis, and that
"Afghanistan has an unprecedented potential for producing a
significant part of the missing opium-based medicines."

According to the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board,
nearly 80 per cent of opium-based painkillers are consumed in just
seven wealthy countries: the U.S., the U.K., France, Spain, Italy,
Japan and Australia. Opiate medicines are under-prescribed due, in
part, to cost considerations.

And so, official estimated requirements that regulate the globally
permitted production of opiates habitually underestimate genuine need.

The Senlis Council calculates that, in 2002, more than 10 per cent of
Afghanistan's annual production of 4,100 tonnes of opium could be
diverted be from the illegal drug trade as part of a new system of
licensed opium production.

NATO money being spent on counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics
initiatives is in a sense money down the drain, fighting causes that
are difficult or impossible to win.

Why not channel those dollars into a regulated industry in
Afghanistan, one that would help people get out of poverty and
perhaps develop a stake in having an orderly economy free of
drug-financed warlords?

The question isn't even under discussion by NATO-member governments.
A knee-jerk anti-drug posture appears to be thwarting any
experimentation with new strategies.

So kudos to Dion, who, in his Montreal speech advocating the proposed
pilot project on legalized poppy production, stated, "If we do not
start to think creatively about the problem of the drug economy the
situation will never get better."

Canada has a large stake in seeing the Afghan economy improve,
particularly in the south where poppies flourish. It's time to debate
pros and cons of legalized poppy production.