DEADLY SCOURGE NO-ONE IS FIGHTING

This month, Prime Minister John Key made a bare-chested declaration of
war against the drug lords.

Custom officers would be redeployed. Cold sufferers would have to
surrender their decongestants for the great crusade against P.

Yet at the same time he's dispatching a new wave of New Zealand troops
to try to prop up the narco-state of Afghanistan, where one in seven
people is involved in peddling opium-based drugs to the world.

In a report issued last week by the United National Office on Drugs
and Crime (www.unodc.org), executive director Antonio Maria Costa says
the intermediaries in the trade are not just "shady characters linked
to international mafias, they are also white-collar Afghan officials
who take a cut by protecting the drug trade as well as the religious
fanatics and political insurgents who do the same to finance their
cause".

The world opiate trade - 92 per cent of which originates in the poppy
fields of Afghanistan - is worth $91 billion a year, or about half New
Zealand's annual gross domestic product.

The trade is worth more than the GDP of 120 countries, yet only 4 per
cent of the crop is eradicated at source, and less than 2 per cent of
drugs are seized by law enforcement agents locally.

Mr Costa says: "The lines between the ideologically driven Taleban,
the criminal groups in the business for profit, and the government
officials taking a cut for greed, have become blurry ... The Afghan
drug economy generates several hundred million dollars per year into
evil hands - some with black turbans, others with white collars.

"The Afghan opium trade is a well-funded threat to the health of
nations."

This is all happening under the eyes of the grand United States-led
coalition of troops against terror. Defence Minister Wayne Mapp
returned from the battle zone this weekend declaring the strategy in
Afghanistan was "on the right track".

Yet reading this report, you can't help concluding that instead of
risking the lives of our SAS troops in winning hearts and minds, we'd
be doing a better job for humanity by dispatching a fleet of
top-dressing planes loaded up with a potent herbicide.

There's something truly Alice in Wonderland about a coalition of
modern democracies hunting through the wilds of central Asia for a
mythical beast called terror which it can't find, while leaking across
the borders between the soldiers' legs is an evil doing more harm than
all the terror plots dreamed up by mad mullahs in 100 years.

Mr Costa says that 100,000 people a year die from Afghan opium
products.

The 10,000 a year who die from heroin overdoses in Nato countries is
five times higher than the total number of Nato troops killed in
Afghanistan since the war began in 2001.

It's estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 Russians die from drug overdoses
a year. Neighbouring Iran has one of the world's most serious opiate
addiction problems, with about one million users.

Afghanistan opium is not only causing a huge health problem worldwide,
it's also funding crime and terror - the very enemies the coalition
troops are trying to defeat. The report says the opiate cash "fills
the coffers of international organised crime groups and finances
insurgent and extremist groups active in conflict zones throughout the
world.

"Nowhere is this synergy more evident than in Afghanistan where
insurgents and drug traffickers have joined forces and presently
control parts of the southern drug corridors into Iran and Pakistan,"
Mr Costa says. "The Afghanistan/Pakistan border region has turned into
the world's largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is
illicit - drugs of course, but also weapons, bomb-making equipment,
chemical precursors, drug money, even people."

Afghanistan is listed by the World Bank as being in the top 2 per cent
of corrupt countries, so it is pointless to expect its government to
arrest this trade.

The report notes that a "segment of [Afghan] state apparatus have
effectively been 'captured' by a specific client group, organised
crime. In this sense it is not only a failure of state institutions
but also a means of enrichment and empowerment of political elites.

"Most interactions with government services in Afghanistan generally
involves some form of bribery."

The vote-rigging by President Karzai's supporters in the recent first
round of the presidential elections is evidence enough of that. That
even one New Zealand soldier's life is being put at risk to prop up
this failed regime is bad enough. But to be part of a coalition that
has turned a blind eye to an evil trade that has burgeoned since the
Western troops arrived is worse.

Only last week, John Key declared: "The drug P is a dangerously
destructive substance that has taken hold in New Zealand. It is
wrecking lives, wrecking families, fuelling crime and allowing gangs
to flourish. I'm determined to confront this scourge."

Who would argue with this declaration of war? Yet on a world scale,
the opiate trade is killing around 100,000 a year. It is triggering
the spread of HIV at an unprecedented rate, funding criminal groups,
insurgents and terrorists worldwide.

And what do we do? We send our troops to the poppy fields of
Afghanistan and tell them to look behind the petals for religious
fanatics instead. Where's the Agent Orange herbicide when you need it?