THE POPPY PROBLEM KEEPS GROWING

A Lot More Canadians Are Likely To Die From Afghan Heroin Than To
Perish On Afghan Soil

SEEDS OF TERROR: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
By Gretchen Peters

St. Martin's Press/ H.B. Fenn, 300 pages ($32.95)

Last November, I met a beautiful and cheerful young woman who was
literally bursting with song. She was high on heroin, arms bruised
from needle punctures, and so terribly thin that her pyjamas flapped
as she danced through the vomit- and urine-stained halls of one of
Vancouver's cheapest hotels.

By now, the young woman is probably dead -- one of the latest
Canadian victims not just of the war on drugs, but also of the war in
Afghanistan.

Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror is essential reading for anyone
concerned about public policy in the drug, defence or diplomatic
domains. The former ABC News reporter draws on decades of field
experience, numerous interviews and secret government documents to
demonstrate that opium -- not religious or political ideology --
poses the greatest challenge to the United States and NATO in
Afghanistan today.

She traces the origins of the crisis to the United States'
unqualified support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s. Focused on
winning a proxy war against the Soviet Union, policymakers looked the
other way as their local allies began to refine opium into heroin and
smuggle it to Europe and North America.

A decade later, after the mujahedeen had morphed into the Taliban and
taken power in Kabul, they continued to rely on heroin as a major
source of income.

It might have been possible to close down the drug labs and smuggling
routes during the first year or two of the U.S.-led occupation. But
the Bush administration instead shifted its attention to Iraq,
leaving only 10,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2002.

As Peters explains, this forced NATO commanders, short of boots on
the ground, "to rely on aerial bombardments, killing hundreds of
civilians and hardening the Afghan villagers against the West."

The mission was further compromised by a narrow focus on capturing or
killing the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership. In late 2001, U.S.
troops detained Haji Juma Khan, whom they knew to be a drug smuggler
with ties to the Taliban. But when they realized that he couldn't
lead them to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, they let him go.

Over the next seven years, Khan moved some $7 billion worth of opium
to international markets.

According to Peters, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was
concerned that Afghanistan "could turn into another costly drug war
like Colombia" and rejected any engagement in counter-narcotics
activities as "mission creep."

There are important similarities between the Taliban and Colombia's
rebels, who go by the acronym FARC. Both groups began as an armed
resistance to a corrupt government before evolving into a service
agency for drug smugglers and international crime syndicates.

As Peters explains, heroin has transformed the Taliban into a
"gangland-style grouping of tribal leaders, businessmen, regional
warlords, and thugs." She surveyed 350 people involved in the drug
trade along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: "Eight-one percent of
respondents said the Taliban commanders' first priority was to make
money, rather than to recapture territory and impose the strict brand
of Islam they had espoused while in power."

Drug money has also enabled the Taliban to re-arm, recruit new
members and expand its geographic reach. Today, much of southern
Afghanistan is under de facto Taliban control.

The expanded Taliban influence facilitates the growing of even more
poppies: More than 98 per cent of the 2008 crop came from insurgent-held areas.

Peters's principal concern is that the Taliban's involvement with
heroin might enable its ally, al-Qaida, to strike U.S. territory with
a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

Heroin is, of course, an insidious weapon of mass destruction itself.
By 2007, Afghanistan accounted for a staggering 97 per cent of the
global supply.

Cheap Afghan heroin has flooded into Vancouver on ships from China
and India. The number of Canadian civilians dying as a result of
Afghan heroin likely far exceeds the number of Canadian soldiers
being killed on Afghan soil.

But destroying poppy fields in Afghanistan is not the answer. Peters
explains that "wide-scale spraying would play into the hands of
traffickers and terrorists" by driving up opium prices and thus
increasing profit margins for drug dealers and the Taliban while
making life even harder for Afghan farmers.

Nine years ago, the UN drug control program offered the Taliban $250
million to stop the cultivation of poppies. The Taliban agreed and
was able to reduce the acreage planted with poppies by more than 90
per cent. However, the Taliban leadership also bought and stockpiled
huge stores of opium before imposing the ban, selling it after prices
had increased tenfold.

At the same time, "the poppy ban sparked a humanitarian disaster" for
Afghan farmers, hundreds of thousands of whom defaulted on loans,
sold off their land and livestock and fled to Pakistan.

Paying Afghan farmers to grow other crops is not the answer, either.
In 2003, after the British introduced a $140-million crop
substitution program, more Afghan farmers planted poppies in order to
become eligible for being paid to switch crops the following year.

Eight years after 9/11, Peters argues that "the single greatest
failure in the war on terror is not that Osama bin Laden continues to
elude capture, or that the Taliban has staged a comeback, or even
that al Qaeda is regrouping in Pakistan's tribal areas and probably
planning fresh attacks on the West." Rather, "it's the spectacular
incapacity of western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money
that is keeping their networks afloat."

She advocates military action, including air strikes against heroin
labs and drug-smuggling convoys and the targeted killing of upper-
and mid-level traffickers. At the same time, she advocates
negotiations with the Taliban and concedes that "defeating the
insurgency and the drug trade will now take years, maybe decades of
sustained investment and effort."

There is no denying that drug money, terrorism and technology are a
potentially catastrophic mix. But Peters arrives at her military
solution after only the briefest consideration of its possible
limitations. For instance, although she identifies the parallel
between Afghanistan and Colombia, she makes no attempt to assess
whether the use of military force against drug traffickers has
succeeded in the South American country.

Nor does she mention the concerns some NATO governments have
expressed over targeting criminals, rather than combatants, with air strikes.

She dismisses a much-discussed alternative approach -- that of
purchasing Afghan opium for medicinal use -- with the unconvincing
argument that the demand for morphine has already been met. This is
not the case in the developing world.

Peters also fails to mention the most radical and perhaps sensible
policy alternative of all. Civil libertarians argue that legalizing
drugs (and regulating and taxing them) would be more effective and,
ultimately, less harmful, than futilely trying to eliminate them
through force of arms.

These disagreements aside, there is one more reason why this is a
must-read book: Peters has apparently succeeded in convincing Barack
Obama, because many of her policy prescriptions have been adopted by him.