AFGHAN POPPIES CAN PRODUCE NEEDED LEGAL OPIATES

Jamilla Niazi is a 40-year-old woman with a freckly face and high
cheekbones. When she arrives in a refugee camp in Helmand province in
southern Afghanistan to speak to me via Internet camera phone, her
features are hidden behind the blue burqa she is forced to wear in
the scorching summer heat. She peels back the gauze and smiles.

She doesn't do this much anymore -- not since the death threats began
to come every night, pledging to burn her in acid. To jihadis, Niazi
has committed an intolerable offense: She is the head teacher of a
school for girls. "The Taliban have come back," says the aid worker
with Niazi. "They control this area now." The night before our
conversation, they burned down a school in nearby Nabili, and Taliban
fighters planted a landmine in the playground of another girls school.

They may be coming for Niazi next. One main thing has brought the
Taliban back to life to terrorize Afghanistan's women: drugs.

Or, more accurately, George W. Bush's war on them. This summer,
Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council, an
independent, Brussels, Belgium-based think tank, commissioned more
than 30 researchers to ask why so many southern Afghans were turning
to the Taliban when they had cheered their defeat just five years
ago. He found that "the Taliban revival is directly, intimately
related to the (poppy) crop eradication program.

It could not have happened if the U.S. was not aggressively destroying crops.

This is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the
foreigners." The Afghan people are rebelling because the U.S.
government is currently committed to destroying 60 percent of their economy.

In the name of the "war on drugs," a U.S. corporation, Dyncorp, is
being paid to barge into the fields of some of the poorest people in
the world and systematically destroy their only livelihood. These
Afghans are growing poppies -- from which heroin is derived -- out of
need, not greed.

One-quarter of all Afghan babies die before age 5. The Senlis Council
warns that if Western governments continue this program of economic
destruction -- and the negative propaganda bonanza it creates -- the
Taliban may be sufficiently rejuvenated to march on Kabul, depose
President Hamid Karzai and pin up a "Welcome home, Mr. bin Laden"
banner. There is an alternative to this disastrous spiral.

The world is suffering from a shortage of legal opiates.

The World Health Organization describes it as "an unprecedented
global pain crisis." About 80 percent of the world's population has
almost no access to these painkillers. Even in developed countries,
for cancer care alone there is an unmet annual need for 550 metric
tons more opium to make morphine. Afghan farmers continue to produce
the stuff, only to be made into criminals because of it. At the same
time, in a Kabul hospital, half the patients who need opiates are
thrashing about in agony because they can't get them, while in fields
only a few miles away opium crops are being hacked to pieces. The
solution is simple.

Instead of destroying Afghanistan's most valuable resource, Western
governments should buy it outright and resell it to producers of
legal opiate-based painkillers on the global market. Instead of
confronting Afghan farmers about their crop, our representatives
should be approaching them with hard cash. This has been successfully
tried before.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to demand that the
opium farmers of southern Turkey destroy their crops.

Every attempt at destruction -- carried out by reluctant Turkish
prime ministers coerced with threats of cuts in U.S. military aid -- failed.

Eventually, Turkey was considered to be such a crucial Cold War ally
that the United States granted an exception.

So Turkey joined India as a legal supplier of opiates for
pain-control purposes, and it remains so today.

Isn't Afghanistan even more important today than Turkey was in the
1970s? It is a strange truth that if President Bush really wants to
live up to his rhetoric about saving Afghanistan, he must urgently
launch the biggest drug deal in history. Niazi knows what will happen
if he doesn't. In a low, sad voice, she says, "My school will be
destroyed forever." She pauses. "All women love their freedom.

Who wants to be a prisoner and to be illiterate? Not Afghan women.
.. You promised you would not let this happen to us again. You promised."