HELP AFGHANISTAN BY BURNING ITS POISONOUS POPPY CROP

Now that the conventional war is over in Afghanistan, the situation calls
for some unconventional initiatives. High on the list should be to buy
Afghanistan's entire poppy crop and burn it.

Last spring the United States gave $43 million to the Taliban as a reward
for trying to enforce its own laws prohibiting the cultivation of the plant
that is made into opium and heroin. Despite the incentive, the drug trade
was not badly disrupted by the Taliban. For 20 years Afghanistan has been
the world's opium king; in 1999 it provided 70 percent of the world supply.

Now, poppies remain as one of the country's few high-demand exports, and it
is too much to hope that farmers, even if given seeds they lack, will
switch immediately to wheat or chick peas.

Only Source of Income

"Afghanistan has an interim government, but no legitimate source of revenue
and no defense budget," writes Pavel Felgenhauer in The Moscow Times. "The
only significant domestic source of income in Afghanistan is the production
and trafficking of heroin. The Northern Alliance army that liberated Kabul
last November was raised with and is still financed by narcodollars."

The corrupting influence of the drug trade crosses Afghanistan's porous
border and is felt all the way to Europe and America. Intrepid reporter
Maureen Orth traveled to the origin of the opium trade route and, writing
in this month's Vanity Fair, puts the problem in financial perspective: A
kilo of the drug nets the Afghan farmer $300; when it crosses the border,
it's worth $3,500. Refined and sold wholesale in Europe, it goes for around
$25,000. Retail, it can be worth $100,000 - perhaps more.

The growers are not part of drug dealers' networks of violence and bribery.
They just sell the poppies. For $100 million the United States and European
allies could buy this crop that sells on the street for some $30 billion,
creates addicts and corrupts governments.

To stop the traffickers would be impossible, just as in Colombia. But if
growers sold first to an allied anti-opium program, supplies would dwindle.
Prices would rise and not all the poppies could be purchased, but most
could. What police chief or sheriff in America wouldn't spend $300 to get
$100,000 worth of heroin off the street?

Once the drug cycle was broken, at least temporarily, other efforts to
provide humane assistance and stability could continue in a safer
environment. Aid agencies are warning that their work is jeopardized by
hoodlums operating in the lawless, remote areas that make up much of the
country.

The penalty for leaving the chaotic country as it is would be high.

"Afghanistan provides a useful point of departure for understanding how
failed and failing states, through the very ills that are brought about or
exacerbated by their weakness, can have such disproportionate influence in
regional and international politics in the new millennium," says Larry
Goodson, an expert on the region and associate professor in the department
of international studies at Bentley College.

"Afghanistan needs to be made into a functioning state if it is going to be
kept from infecting the outside world with its criminal negligence and
militant Islamism," Goodson said in a speech at the Hoover Institution.

Kemp Offers Strategy

How best to do that is the question. A reasonable and affordable approach
is suggested by former vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp in a recent
column: a policy beyond shortsighted retreat and short of a foolish attempt
at nation building.

Kemp suggests the United States nurture democracy and enterprise by
promoting low-tariff trading, helping Afghans start a national bank,
establishing property rights and purchasing the poppy crop to be harvested
this March.

The buy-up would come with the warning that next year, growers would be
considered criminals and their poppy crops would be plowed under.

It is an experiment full of risks, but it would leave no doubt that the
United States has a vision beyond the bombing to help Afghanistan rise from
the dust and stand among the nations that contribute to human development
rather than poison it.