TAKING THE WAR ON DRUGS TO AFGHANISTAN

WASHINGTON (CSM) - The United States is scoring a major victory
against terrorism in the war in Afghanistan, but until the U.S.
successfully tackles that country's drug-trafficking problem it
cannot call the victory permanent.

Drug dealers and arms traders are natural allies; their presence in
Afghanistan and throughout Central Asia undermines already-weak
states and gives militant Islamic groups the means for self-financing.

Afghanistan has been the world's largest grower of poppies for opium
and heroin, largely destined for sale in Europe. Though cultivation
was banned briefly by the Taliban, Afghan drug dealers are back in
business. U.S. bombing raids never directly targeted Afghanistan's
drug-storage or heroin-producing facilities, and Afghanistan's drug
dealers were fast off the mark, distributing seed or cash to purchase
it in the fall. They are now primed to buy up the crop, and are
inciting local farmers to oppose violently the government's efforts
to seize it.

Meanwhile, there is still no U.S. strategy to deal with Afghanistan's
return to narco-trafficking and only a trickle of assistance money in
the pipeline to counter it. The U.S. timetable for rebuilding
Afghanistan must coincide with the way in which risks are generated
and not merely be fashioned after Washington's annual budget cycle.

Unless the growing opium and heroin trade from Afghanistan through
Central Asia is curbed, anti-state groups will continue to have a
ready source of funding, including groups in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai has banned opium-growing but lacks
the money and capacity to enforce his policy successfully. Most local
warlords still profit from narco-trafficking by taxing the crop or
its transit. Until a national military and police force is trained,
Afghanistan must rely on outsiders to enforce the ban, or see it
largely ignored.

Current U.S. policy ensures that the latter will be the case, or
worse, that the ban will help destabilize the Karzai government,
since the Bush administration opposes the creation of a large
international security force, whose mandate spans all of Afghanistan.

Tolerating the rebirth of the drug trade transforms the tragedy of
Afghanistan's poverty into a problem of regional and eventually
global security. One should not minimize how difficult it would be to
cut drug protection sharply in Afghanistan. The network of drug
dealers is fully intertwined with the traditional local elite. No
crop will produce the same income, nor allow a rapacious elite the
same easy riches.

Working with the provisional government, the U.S. should work
aggressively to halt poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
Crop-substitution projects must gain priority; Afghan farmers should
be offered reasonable cash subsidies for destroying the harvest in
the field, or for turning it over for destruction. Those who comply
should qualify for agricultural reform programs, while those who
refuse should lose priority for receiving all forms of development
assistance.

Alongside the provisional government, the U.S. should also destroy
current stores of opium and then close down heroin factories.
Warlords allied with the United States' Afghan military effort must
pledge to remain "drug free"; the U.S. must devote the intelligence
resources to monitoring this.

Otherwise, the U.S. may wind up being the inadvertent regulator of
the very drug trade that it should be stamping out, as U.S. forces
could have to adjudicate between feuding warlords.

Although some funds were recently allocated for eradicating the
current crop, the U.S. approach emphasizes interdiction on Central
Asia's borders, since more than half of Afghan drugs exit into those
states. But current allocations and their promised supplements meet a
fraction of these countries' training needs. Tajikistan and
Turkmenistan already qualify as "narco-states," as their governments
have credibly been accused of sifting profits from the drug trade.
And although Tajikistan's new national drug-control agency has
sharply improved interdiction rates, funds for this U.N.-sponsored
project run out this year.

Afghanistan's drug trade feeds on Central Asia's poverty. Without
concerted action, these fragile states' problems could fester just
when the West is planning to tap Caspian oil and gas reserves -
reserves whose delivery could be compromised by instability in this
land-locked region.

The fight against terrorism cannot hope to succeed unless the U.S.
remains as alert to preventing tomorrow's terrorists from
consolidating as it is to defeating the current threat. As in the
other battlefields of the war on terror, the U.S. must be prepared to
deal a blow to the Afghan drug trade, even if Washington must assume
a disproportionate share of the financial burden.

Martha Brill Olcott is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.