POPPIES SEEM TO MAKE PEOPLE STUPID

Noting the remarkable staying power of the Taliban, observers have
been speculating about the reason. On the face of it, the harsh rule
of Afghanistan's former masters is unlikely to elicit nostalgia. Even
allowing for the peculiarities of the region - backwardness,
tribalism, and so on - what could these fanatic martinets of Islamist
militancy offer to Afghan villagers to merit as much popular support
as they seem to enjoy?

How much support, exactly? Not overwhelming, but enough to keep
Mullah Omar's followers in the game, and cost some Canadian lives.
Support in adversity, one might add, when support is notoriously hard
to come by. Being supported when flush with success is one thing, but
the Taliban has been on the run for the last five years. Cruel,
oppressive, unattractive, defeated - Afghans shouldn't give such
sullen mullahs the time of the day. Indeed, many don't, but amazingly
some do, which raises the question, why?

The answer may be poppies.

More accurately, poppies figure prominently among the answers: far
more prominently than we have been willing to acknowledge. Opium
poppies (Papaver somniferum) are, of course, a source of opiates.
They are also a source of income of some Afghan farmers - even entire
villages. Often, the main, sometimes the sole source. They put bread
on the table for Afghan children. They also keep drug dealers around
the world in luxury automobiles.

Poppies are illicit drugs as well as medicine; cash crops as well as
poison. Their derivatives kill pain in all forms: physical, psychic,
existential. They also cause pain across the same spectrum. As
morphine or codeine, poppies make life bearable for the sick; as
opium or heroin, they turn the vulnerable into zombies.

The Taliban, in addition to being the scourge of the infidel and
Orwellian Big Brothers to their own downtrodden sisters, are also the
drug lords of the Hindu Kush. They buy, manage, protect, transport,
and profit by the farmers' illicit crop. As such, these faith-based
poppy pimps are an important part of the Afghan economy, controlling
a slice estimated at around $600 million annually - some of it
earmarked, no doubt, for the feeding, grooming, and sheltering of
international terrorists.

In 2001 the Americans, practical souls as they are, decided to kill
two birds with one stone. They combined the war on terrorism with the
war on drugs. This seemed cost-effective, and it appealed to the
frugality as well as to the moral sense of President George W. Bush's
conservative base. Killing two birds with one stone isn't a bad idea,
except missing two birds with one stone is a more likely outcome.
Chances are, if you do that, both will fly away.

By trying to fight terrorism and drugs at the same time, the
coalition forces have succeeded in rehabilitating the scruffiest
exponents of Islamofascism, the Taliban, in the eyes of farmers. What
the farmers saw was foreign troops invading and devastating their
crops, and threatening dire consequences if they plant poppies again.
The foreigners didn't say what else of comparable value to plant, so
the farmers shrugged, provided cover for the Taliban (or not, as the
spirit moved them) and increased the cultivation of the Afghan poppy
crop by some 60 per cent, according to figures quoted by the
University of Toronto's Nobel laureate, chemistry professor, John Polanyi.

Ironically, Afghanistan cultivates more poppies today than it did in
2001. Polanyi argues that the trend "threatens to drive the country
inexorably from a narco-economy to a narco-state." Possibly a
narco-state ruled by the Taliban.

It seems opium can stupefy even people who never touch it. Nothing
else can explain the American policy makers' asinine decision to
reenact in 21st century Afghanistan the opium wars of the 19th
century (which eventually led to the Boxer rebellion in China.) What,
beside stupefaction, can explain a policy that tries to win the heart
and mind of a farmer by burning his crops?

Polanyi believes that, far from trying to eliminate the poppy, the
International Narcotics Control Board should license its cultivation
in Afghanistan, as it does in such countries as France, India, or
Turkey. Legalized, Afghan poppies could supply a fast growing world
market for analgesics. Be that as it may, the time to discuss the
elimination of the economic basis of people's lives comes after their
hearts and minds have been won, their friendship secured, and an
alternate basis implemented - not before.