AFGHANISTAN'S DRUG HABIT

AS if there hadn't been enough bad news from Afghanistan of late, now
the country's drug dependency is back in the headlines. On Sept. 2,
the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that
the shattered country is now producing 92 percent of the world's
supply of illegal opium, up from 87 percent in 2004. This deplorable
new record will not be reversed by more belligerent counternarcotics
measures. Instead, America, NATO and the Afghan government must reform
a vital but neglected institution: the local police.

In 2004, for the first time in history, farmers in every province of
Afghanistan chose to cultivate opium poppies. The American and Afghan
governments promised a major poppy eradication campaign. Aid agencies
scrambled to create an economic alternative for the thousands of
Afghans who depended on poppy farming to survive.

Thus in November 2004, I traveled to Lashkargah, the capital of
Helmand Province, the opium heartland of Afghanistan, as the deputy
leader of an "alternative livelihoods" project financed by the United
States Agency for International Development. Our core team was made up
of six Western aid workers, and we hired some 80 Afghan staff members.

In the long-term plan, alternative livelihoods meant helping Afghan
farmers export high-value crops like saffron and cumin. It meant
restoring the orchards and vineyards that had once made Afghanistan a
power in the raisin and almond markets. It meant providing credit to
farmers who had relied on traffickers for affordable loans.

In the short run, however, with the first eradication tractors already
plowing up poppy fields, we had no time for those approaches. Instead,
we created public-works jobs. Like a New Deal agency, we handed out
shovels to thousands of local Afghans and paid them $4 per day to
repair canals and roads. We found plenty of work on Helmand's grand
but dilapidated irrigation system, a legacy of early cold-war American
aid. By May 2005, we had paid out millions of dollars and had some
14,000 men on the payroll simultaneously. The program buoyed the
provincial economy, and would have made a fine launching pad for
long-term alternatives to poppy.

Security was our Achilles' heel. There was a new American military
base by the graveyard on the edge of town, but the few score Iowa
National Guard members there lacked the manpower and the local
knowledge to protect us. We could not afford the professional security
companies in Kabul, most run by brash veterans of Western militaries.
Then, just before Christmas, some of our engineers were carjacked. We
resorted to the only remaining source of protection: the provincial
police.

We soon found that at their best, the Helmand police forces were
half-organized militias with charismatic leadership and years of
combat experience. At their worst, the policemen were bandits,
pederasts and hashish addicts. Our local guard captain was one of the
better ones, but he was still far from reliable.

Once I asked him what he earned as a district police commander. "The
governor paid us no salary," he curtly replied. "The people gave us
money. To thank us for solving their problems." I was never sure if we
were paying him enough to solve our problems.

When the attacks came, our security was useless. On May 18, five of
our Afghan staff members were murdered in the field. The next morning,
one of the funeral convoys was ambushed, leaving six more of our
workers and their relatives dead. The police responded with
indiscriminate arrests and bluster, but they lacked the investigative
skills to catch the killers.

We heard rumors that the attackers were Taliban troops -- and indeed,
the attacks were harbingers of the Taliban resurgence that Helmand has
seen in the last year. We also heard that the Taliban had been paid by
local drug barons to attack our project. All we knew was that we were
targets, and that we could not protect ourselves. Within days, we had
stopped all our projects and most of the staff went home.

To reduce Afghanistan's poppy cultivation, Western governments must
keep their focus on improving security. Aid agencies and the Afghan
government cannot foster alternatives to opium while under fire. In
chaotic times, Afghan farmers are more likely to plant poppy, which
offers the surest and highest returns on investment. Some remote areas
of Afghanistan have grown poppy since the time of Alexander the Great,
but in the irrigated plains of Helmand it caught on only during the
breakdown of order in the 1980's. With security restored, the farmers
of Helmand could rebuild their province and return to licit crops.

Local police forces are the weakest link in Afghanistan's security
net. After the fall of the Taliban, the United States and NATO put
most of their energy into building a professional Afghan Army. The
police forces were essentially surrendered to local warlords -- not
through any malign plan, but by lack of money and attention.

Most Afghan policemen have now gone through a basic training course
run by American and German police officers, but they return to units
that are ill equipped, badly organized, founded on personal loyalty to
a commander and accountable to no one.

The 4,500 British troops now fighting alongside Afghan soldiers in
Helmand can defeat insurgents who muster in large numbers, but they
cannot counter the Taliban's shrewder tactics -- urban ambushes,
suicide bombings and strikes on "soft" civilian targets like our
project. For that, the police are necessary.

The Afghan Army and foreign powers must create space in which a
professional, accountable police force can take root. This means
continued military action against large Taliban incursions, diplomatic
pressure on Pakistan to stop providing a haven for insurgents, and a
focus on shielding the large cities of southern Afghanistan --
Lashkargah, Kandahar and Ghazni -- long enough for the Afghan
government to establish the kernels of an improved police force there.
It will also require an end to the impunity enjoyed by warlords and
major traffickers, who can order an attack safe in the knowledge that
the Taliban will be blamed.

The new Afghan police force needs clear lines of authority, formal
disciplinary procedures and methods for internal oversight and public
complaint. The officers need adequate pay and equipment, which can
come only from Western sources, and better training in investigation
and civilian protection. To ensure that all this makes a difference,
the United States and its allies must commit experienced Western
police officers to field-based mentoring programs with provincial
police forces.

The poppy boom won't be solved by police reform alone, of course. The
Afghan government must purge drug kingpins from the federal and
provincial governments, and continue disarming militias (friendly as
well as hostile).

Nothing has cost President Hamid Karzai more popularity in the south
than the sense that unscrupulous gunmen are back in control. Security
was the Taliban's main selling point when it took control of the
country in the 1990's; it could be again.

Joel Hafvenstein, an international development consultant, is the
author of the forthcoming book "The Opium Season."