A WAR WITHIN A WAR

As The U.S. Finds Itself Somehow Fighting Two
Wars On The Same Front, The Afghan Opium Trade Soars

From Sun Tzu on down, military strategists have warned against fighting
a war on two fronts.

No warnings, however, were ever offered regarding fighting two wars on
the same front.

Who'd be that dumb? And yet this is exactly what's happening in
Afghanistan, where the "War on Terror" runs headfirst into the War on
Drugs, resulting - no surprise in the current political climate - in
chaos rather than synergy.

While the fighting in Iraq is debated on every level from ethical to
tactical, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has been largely
viewed as justified by all but thoroughgoing pacifists.

Unfortunately, as learned the hard way by everyone from Alexander the
Great to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan is a terrible place to fight a
war. Perpetually divided into the fiefdoms of tribal warlords, it's a
guerrilla-friendly high-desert moonscape, impossible to hold or
subdue, and has an economy in which the most viable cash crop is opium
poppies.

As much as one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product comes
from growing some 4,400 tons of opium - yielding an income of $3
billion a year. The United Nations estimates that, last year, Afghan
opium was the raw base for the morphine and heroin consumed by some 10
million users worldwide - two-thirds of the world's illegal opiate
consumption. In addition to this global impact, the massive profits
from poppies are also funding the re-emergence of the Taliban as a
political and military force.

"Drug money is absolutely supporting terrorist groups," Alexandre
Schmidt, deputy head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in
Afghanistan, told the Los Angeles Times as early as May 2005, but drug
money is also causing deep rifts within the U.S./coalition-backed
government of President Hamid Karzai, as former anti-Taliban allies
like the Northern Alliance move deeper and deeper into the dope business.

When the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, opinions on opium were
divided. Some fundamentalist factions believed the poppy fields should
be eradicated as an affront to morality, while others saw opiates as a
poison that would hasten the downfall of "the Great Satan." Prior to
their removal from power, the eradicators had prevailed, and, by 1999,
poppy production was at an all-time low. After their fall, though,
opium became a dangerously lucrative free-for-all, extending to the
highest levels of the Karzai administration. A perfect example is
Mohammed Daoud, the leader, in 2001, of the Afghan irregulars who,
with U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, besieged thousands of Taliban in
Kunduz. But, as Afghanistan's deputy interior minister in charge of
the anti-drug effort, Daoud - according to the BBC and other sources -
became overlord of a drug operation, fronted by his brother Haji Agha,
that ran opium and low-grade heroin over the border with the former
Soviet republic of Tajikistan, from where the Russian mob ultimately
moved it west to Moscow, Europe, and the U.S. Meanwhile, hundreds of
millions of dollars in aid, earmarked for alternatives to poppy
cultivation, vanished into the seemingly bottomless well of Afghani
administrative corruption.

A unique solution to the Afghani opium problem was recently suggested
in The Times of London by columnist Camilla Cavendish that borrowed an
idea from, of all people, Richard Nixon. When, in the early 1970s,
Turkey was the primary supplier of illicit raw opium, that country was
granted a international license to grow poppies for the legitimate
manufacture of clinical morphine.

Today, more than 600,000 Turkish poppy farmers make an honest and
lucrative living, but their annual production now falls some 10,000
tons short of the demands of the global pharmaceutical industry.
Cavendish makes the infinitely obvious suggestion that perhaps
Afghanistan should be similarly licensed to take up this slack.

The term is "economic engagement," but whether, of course - in an
election year - the hidebound drug warriors of Washington are smart
enough to explore such a solution, even coming as it does from Nixon,
one of their cultural heroes, is highly debatable.