POPPY-RICH AFGHANISTAN IS NO MODEL

THE GOOD NEWS, for drug fiends, is that Afghanistan has just
harvested its biggest opium crop ever, up a whopping 59 percent from
last year and big enough to cover 130 percent of the entire world
market. The street price for illegal heroin, 92 percent of which now
comes from Afghanistan, should be way down from Bangkok to London,
and for those shooting up in the back alleys of Chicago. The bad
news, for the rest of us, is that in Bush-liberated Afghanistan,
billions in drug profits are financing the Taliban.

Remember them, the guys who harbored the al Qaeda terrorists, who
gifted us with the 9/11 attacks five years ago, that President Bush
promised to eliminate?

Well, it turns out that while he was distracted with Iraq, the
patrons of terrorism were very much in business back where the 9/11
attack was hatched, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state that
provides a lucrative source of cash for the "evildoers" Bush forgot about.

The Bush administration has, for half a decade, celebrated its
overthrow of the Taliban and subsequent national elections in
Afghanistan, but if this is democratic nation-building, then the
model must be Colombia, the narco-state where the political process
masks the real power held by drug lords and radical insurgents.
Afghanistan is dominated not by the government in Kabul, but by a
patchwork of warlords, terrorist groups and drug traffickers
completely addicted to the annual poppy harvest's profits.

Or perhaps the model is post-invasion Iraq, because Afghanistan is
now statistically as deadly for American soldiers, according to the
New York Times, while in both countries suicide and roadside bombings
are on the rise and women are retreating to the burka to avoid
persecution by armed zealots.

In any case, reported the United Nations this week, "opium
cultivation in Afghanistan is out of control" despite the expenditure
of billions of dollars by the West to fight it. Intelligence
estimates of the Taliban's cut of this lucrative trade, which
represents more than a third of the entire Afghan economy, range up
to 70 percent, according to ABC News.

"The political, military and economic investments by coalition
countries are not having much visible impact on drug cultivation,"
reported the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in its
authoritative annual survey. "As a result, Afghan opium is fueling
insurgency in Western Asia, feeding international mafias and causing
100,000 deaths from overdoses every year." "The southern part of
Afghanistan [is] displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient
collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking,
insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption," added Antonio Maria
Costa, the agency's director.

Yet on Tuesday, the White House was once again trumpeting that "we
have deprived al Qaeda of safe haven in Afghanistan and helped a
democratic government rise in its place." Considering that Osama bin
Laden is still reputed to be hiding somewhere along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border and Afghan President Hamid Karzai is
desperately dependent on the support of drug lords and warlords to
prevent renewed civil war, such claims are a blatant fraud.

The senior British military commander in Afghanistan recently
described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" and said
NATO forces were "running out of time" to salvage the situation. "The
narcotics industry accounts for over one-third of Afghanistan's gross
domestic product and poses a threat to that country's stability and
emerging democracy," carefully admits a recent U.S. State Department
fact sheet.

What the Bush administration will not confront in Afghanistan, or in
Iraq, is that its ill-conceived and disastrously executed
nation-building schemes are sinking into the swamp of local and
historical realities.

Enamored of American military might but having little understanding
of the world beyond, Bush and his team have ignored Gen. Colin
Powell's reported "you break it, you own it" warnings, floundering
after initial military victories and ultimately strengthening the
hand of local and international terrorists. Rather than take care of
business in Afghanistan after 9/11, Bush and clueless U.S. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed bin Laden to slip out of the Tora
Bora caves to plan more attacks and the Taliban to regroup.

Instead, Bush and Co. threw the bulk of our military and aid
resources into a disastrous attempt to remake oil-rich Iraq, which
had nothing to do with 9/11, into an American puppet state.

With U.S. midterm elections around the corner, embattled Republicans
are now desperately claiming to be the only thing standing between us
and a bogeyman they are calling "Islamo-fascism," and ridiculously
comparing the "war on terror" to the fight against the Nazis.
Fortunately, if belatedly, two-thirds of the American electorate now
recognize that our president is all hat and no cattle, as they say in
Texas, a leader much better at starting wars than winning them.