CULTIVATING OPIUM, NOT DEMOCRACY

Afghanistan's crop 'has spread like wildfire.'

Why am I such a party pooper? Trust me, I desperately want to be like
those happy-go-lucky folks in the red states who apparently think
things are hurtling along just fine. Unfortunately, the facts keep
bridling my optimism.

Take the United States' alleged great achievements in Afghanistan.
Remember during the campaign how President Bush repeatedly celebrated
the divinely inspired success of his administration toward turning
Afghanistan into a stable democracy? "In Afghanistan, I believe that
the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty," he said in the third
presidential debate. "And I can't tell you how encouraged I am to see
freedom on the march." As compared with Iraq, which Jon Stewart's "The
Daily Show" has aptly titled "Mess-O-Potamia," Afghanistan has claimed
fewer American lives and taxpayer dollars, while managing to hold a
presidential election since U.S. and warlord irregulars deposed the
brutal Taliban regime three years ago.

Sure, we haven't captured Osama bin Laden or the Taliban's Mullah
Mohammed Omar, and 20,000 young American soldiers are rather miserably
stationed there, but who am I to nitpick when faced with the stirring
sight of democracy abloom?

Well, truth is, freedom in Afghanistan continues to be on more of a
stoned-out stumble than a brisk march. The Taliban has been driven
from Kabul, but it still exists in the countryside, and the bulk of
the country is still run, de facto, by competing warlords dependent on
the opium trade - which now accounts for 60% of the Afghan economy.

"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is
slowly becoming a reality," said the executive director of the United
Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa. "Opium
cultivation, which has spread like wildfire S could ultimately
incinerate everything: democracy, reconstruction and stability."

Costa's office has just released a slew of discouraging numbers that
lay out in numbing detail how Afghanistan's opium production has
soared in the last year to an all-time high. The raw form of heroin is
now the staple crop in every province, while in just one year the area
under poppy cultivation has increased 64%. The country produces 87% of
the world's opium, and one out of 10 Afghans is employed by the
illicit industry, according to the alarming U.N. report.

Of course, brandishing quotes from the U.N. doesn't sit well with
isolationist yahoos. So, for them, here are highlights from the White
House's own Office of National Drug Control Policy report, which
Friday painted an even darker picture: "Current [Afghan opium]
cultivation levels equate to a S 239% increase in the poppy crop and
a 73% increase in potential opium production over 2003 estimates" - a
sixfold increase in the three years since the Taliban was driven from
Kabul.

No matter whom you listen to, then, the drug war in Afghanistan is a
bust. Unfortunately, both the U.N. and the White House have repeatedly
said the drug war and the war on terror are nearly synonymous,
especially in Afghanistan, where drug money has long directly and
indirectly aided and abetted extremists such as Al Qaeda.

Indeed, this administration came into office preoccupied by the war on
drugs and indifferent to the war on terror. Before 9/11, even though
Afghanistan was harboring the world's No. 1 terror suspect and his
organization, the White House was so happy with the Taliban regime's
drug-trade crackdown that Secretary of State Colin Powell announced in
May 2001 May that the U.S. was extending $43 million in humanitarian
aid to Kabul, under U.N. auspices, as a reward.

Now that it has the war on terror as a perfect excuse for such wildly
risky fantasies as the wholesale remaking of the Middle East at
gunpoint, winning the drug war in Afghanistan is no longer even on the
White House's radar. Never mind that the drug trade is booming in
Afghanistan and those who harbored Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are regrouping.

In the opium haze that threatens to swallow up Afghanistan's vaunted
rebirth, it is only the illusion of progress - not progress itself -
that is being sold. Because the president has presented all this as a
wonderful dream instead of a nightmare that Afghanistan has had
before, it raises the question: Just what is he smoking?