OPIUM FIELDS SHOULD BECOME MILITARY TARGET

The U.S. air assault on Afghanistan offers a golden opportunity to put a
dent in the world heroin trade, which is helping to finance the Taliban and
terrorism.

The United States and its allies should use the occasion to destroy as much
of the Afghan opium crop as possible, before reserves stored in Afghan
warehouses can be dumped on the American and European markets in the form
of heroin and morphine. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Experts say the opium trade is a major money-maker for the Taliban and for
terror networks like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. The connection
between drugs and politics that we see in places like Colombia is just as
real in Afghanistan, source of 70 percent of the world's opium.

There are plenty of problems with going after the opium crop, in addition
to the difficulty of finding the targets. The crop is the backbone of the
Afghan economy, such as it is after years of warfare. Farmers would need
aid and substitute crops or they'll soon replace what's destroyed.

The Northern Alliance, the Afghan resistance allied with the United States
against the Taliban, also gets important funding from the drug business.

But the opportunity before us now is not to solve these longer-range
problems, which we probably can't fix anyway. The international drug trade
and the U.S. market for its products aren't going to be eliminated by air
raids. We can deal with the problem of rebuilding Afghanistan when we've
achieved some of our goals in the war on terrorism.

What we can do now is burn up some of our enemies' financial resources at a
time when we need to strike them in any way we can.

The United States would be thoroughly justified in spraying the Afghan
poppy fields that produce opium, and in destroying stockpiled opium or heroin.