OPIUM CRUSADE FUELS TALIBAN

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 land mine 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."