AFGHANI REGIMES COME AND GO, BUT OPIUM POPPIES PAY THE BILLS

It has always been easier to march into Kabul than to get out alive or
to achieve in Afghanistan what one went to do.

During a couple of thousand years living at the collision point of
empires, Afghans have become adept at seeing off interlopers, either
with guns or obstructionism. Those invaders who couldn't be driven
back across the mountain passes through which they came have sometimes
been absorbed into Afghanistan's makeshift society.

Nearly three years after the American-led invasion to oust the Islamic
fascist Taliban regime -- itself an alien imposition -- and its
al-Qaida terrorist guests, essential Afghanistan is asserting itself
yet again.

Afghanistan's formula for survival as a country has been to avoid
becoming a nation. Any time there have been attempts to weld the
mutually suspicious regional and ethnic factions into a nation under a
strong central government it has led to civil war or foreign invasion.

Afghanistan survives best when its people -- 40 per cent Pashtuns, 20
per cent Tajiks, 20 per cent Hazaras and five per cent Uzbeks -- rule
their own regions with minimal interference from Kabul.

This formula is being tested again as Afghanistan prepares for
presidential elections early in October.

The favourite is Hamid Karzai, the interim president and a Pashtun,
who has the backing of the 18,000 United States troops hunting
resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas. He is also the beneficiary
of the efforts by 8,000 NATO peacekeepers, among them 700 Canadians,
to bring security to Kabul and some of the safer areas of northern
Afghanistan.

But few observers in Afghanistan expect Karzai to be able to win
outright with more than 50 per cent of the vote on the first ballot.
He faces 17 rivals, among them some of the county's most prominent
regional ethnic warlords who between them control around 50,000
well-armed fighters. They can be expected to frustrate efforts to make
Kabul the seat of an effective central government.

An increasingly powerful element in the balance of Afghanistan's
future is its emergence as the producer of 75 per cent of the world's
heroin, including 95 per cent of the drug trafficked in Europe.
Profits from heroin derived from the opium poppy were $2.3 billion
last year, making up more than half the country's total economy,
according to the World Bank.

Large amounts of this money were creamed off by the warlords to
sustain their militias and regional prestige. There are even several
ministers in Karzai's interim government who are at the top of the
drug trafficking food chain.

The United Nations expects Afghanistan's heroin output to double this
year.

The Karzai government has tried to entice farmers to grow wheat by
offering a subsidy of $350 US per hectare. But since growing opium
poppies brings farmers at least $3,000 US a hectare, there have been
few recruits.

Until now, the U.S. and NATO forces have largely ignored opium poppy
production and trafficking, which was rigorously restricted by the
Taliban, some say to maximize their own profits in the trade.

However, last week U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, visiting
Kabul, ruminated that Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming a
narco-state. There are plans, he suggested, to use Washington's troops
to attack traffickers and the factories where opium is turned into
heroin.

If it happens, this will be a significant change in American policy.
The major allies of U.S. forces and intelligence agencies against the
Taliban and al-Qaida have been the warlords of the Northern Alliance
who all depend on opium profits to one degree or another.

All are either themselves running against Karzai for the presidency or
are backing surrogates.

These include the most powerful anti-Taliban warlord, Mohammed Qasim
Fahim of the Tajiks, who was Afghanistan's defence minister until he
fell out with President Karzai a few weeks ago.

Then there is Ismael Khan, the governor of the northwestern province
of Herat. Another is Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Uzbeks and a fourth is
the Hazara leader Mohammed Mohaqiq.

So necessary were the Northern Alliance fighters to the U.S.-led
invasion that Washington turned a blind eye to the warlord's sources
of funds.

The Central Intelligence Agency 40 years ago showed the same loyalty
to its allies among the hill tribes in the poppy-growing Golden
Triangle of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The CIA even helped
traffic heroin to the streets of America.

In the three years since the Afghanistan invasion, the refusal by
various American agencies to act against their warlord allies over
opium has been a major impediment to peace and reconstruction in the
country.

Now, however, Washington appears to have joined the dots and
recognized that heroin trafficking is at least as destabilizing as the
Taliban or al-Qaida remnants. What has helped is growing evidence that
al-Qaida and the Taliban are themselves getting into the drug trade to
support their cause.

But little will be done until October elections produce the
warlord-of-choice as president and, after that, Afghanistan may be the
first narco-democracy.