POPPIES FLOURISH WHEN WORLD IGNORES ITS DUTY

The revival of opium production in post-Taliban Afghanistan is, once again,
evidence of the shortsighted lack of commitment the world community has to
put failed states back on the road to recovery.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States it was easy
to get support around the globe for the American effort to dislodge the
brutish Taliban government and go after the al-Qaida terrorists who had set
up shop in this remote mountain state.

The Taliban regime had gained recognition from only a handful of nations,
while most of the world community looked on as it practised its ninth
century, misogynist and xenophobic philosophy, enslaving its women and
destroying its past, with hardly a glance.

We acted as though an evil regime had every right to commit a never-ending
string of atrocities as long as it didn't inconvenience us.

With the attacks on Washington and New York we felt inconvenienced. Not that
this was the first major terror attack planned and launched from this
territory. Both the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
and the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole -- attacks that killed
hundreds -- were planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden while he was
nestled safely in Afghanistan.

But the use of innocent civilians trapped on hijacked aircraft as weapons to
bring down the World Trade Center and smash the Pentagon was too much to
ignore. So we marched in, united in our desire to dislodge the Taliban
brutes.

But the job was only partially done.

In its own brutish way, the Taliban was successful in pulling the
mountainous land out of the world drug trade. Farmers who were caught
growing the opium were summarily dealt with.

The world promised that once the backward Taliban was dislodged, the
international community would be there to see to it peace, security and
prosperity would be brought to a land time and humanity had forgotten.

Canada, to its credit, took a leading role in securing the country. Not only
did it play an important role in the battle to rid the land of the Taliban,
former prime minister Jean Chretien (in an effort to escape too much
criticism for refusing to go to Iraq) promised more troops than this country
could comfortably muster to lead the contingent in Kabul.

While Kabul gained a measure of security, it never received the
international help necessary to rebuild. And the countryside was almost
completely neglected.

The world had to be there, to make sure farmers would be growing the food
the country desperately needed by giving them a market they could fairly
trade into for badly needed foreign exchange.

Instead, farmers had little choice but to grow poppies for the warlords
(including the dreaded Taliban and al-Qaida). In today's Afghanistan,
poppies are lucrative, guns are ubiquitous and the farmers who grow poppies
starve and die.

The UN estimates last year's crop in Afghanistan accounted for
three-quarters of the world's opium. That production, which is expected to
be dwarfed this year, brought the country $2.3 billion US in foreign
exchange and accounted for more than half of the country's gross domestic
product.

Although the British have helped establish an anti-drug unit to combat the
industry, it doesn't have enough resources to even make a dent on the trade.
And it is becoming increasingly clear that many officials in Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's administration are already elbow-deep in the
business. Once a bureaucracy becomes entrenched in such an illegal and
profitable business, it becomes nearly impossible to knock it out.

That has been the experience in Mexico, where efforts to modernize the
police and army are hamstrung by officials who are forced to choose between
a life of poverty wages or graft, or who have been involved in the drug
business for so long they have too much at stake to allow it to be shut
down.

Similar problems exist in Colombia -- a failed country the U.S. wants to use
as a model to combat the crisis in Afghanistan.

One would have hoped that watching what happens in countries such as
Somalia, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Colombia, where warlords and
crooks have been given free rein, would have taught the world a lesson.

Rebuilding states is a long, drawn-out, costly but worthwhile exercise and
it not only takes the commitment to send troops, but an equally forceful
commitment to build the educational, physical and economic infrastructures
to allow people to live peaceful and prosperous lives.

Given the chance, that's what most people want.