CANADA'S ATTACK ON AFGHAN SMACK

Before Being Killed By A Suicide Bomber, Daniel Werb Reports, Glyn
Berry Was Part Of A Scheme To Help A Minor Nation Kick A Major Habit

Early in the 11th century, the master Afghan doctor Avicenna, one of
the fathers of modern medicine, praised opium as the most potent of
all pain relievers. Yet, a thousand years later, the same drug,
coupled with resurgent terrorism, has his homeland in agony.

Opium and insurgency both played a role in the suicide bombing of a
Canadian patrol on the outskirts of Kandahar this week that left
diplomat Glyn Berry dead and three soldiers travelling with him
severely injured.

Mr. Berry was director of the Canadian reconstruction team operating
in the region, and perfectly aware that Kandahar is a traditional
opium hotbed as well as a former Taliban stronghold.

But he was determined that, as part of rebuilding the area, the team
would undermine the drug traffickers as well as the insurgents, who
are often believed to be one and the same.

In a telephone interview conducted not long before his death, he
called Canadian soldiers "gate-openers" who "allow us to reach
communities that haven't had any contact with the central government
since the days of the Taliban."

Opening the gate, he added, had shown him that, when it comes to
opium, "the Afghan farmer isn't in it for profit -- they're in it for
survival. If you don't produce enough, you end up in debt to someone
with less-than-noble objectives. Certainly, the farmers I've met have
an acute unwillingness to be a part of the business."

His hopes were especially high because of a "beautiful, defining
moment" -- the recent gathering of residents of the region, Afghan
officials and Canadian military and diplomatic personnel for a shura,
or traditional political council, to discuss reconstruction priorities.

"All these communities that hadn't participated politically," he
explained, "were suddenly involved and working together with us,"
raising the possibility that the Canadian mission really could weaken
farmers' willingness to toil for the drug lords.

Mr. Berry's killing, of course, puts this sense of unity in grave
jeopardy and serves as a stark reminder of the forces that threaten
the stability of the entire region.

The stakes are high -- the planting of this year's opium crop drew to
a close last month, and now, only weeks after last year's final
harvest, drugs are flooding the trade routes from Afghanistan to
Iran, Russia, Europe, China and beyond.

In the first two weeks of this year, more than three tonnes of opium,
heroin and morphine were seized, sometimes bloodily, by border guards
in one Iranian border province alone. Such hauls suggest a huge jump
in heroin production that could very well drag Afghanistan back into
a state of perpetual violence.

But Mr. Berry was far from the only one fighting to keep that from happening.

At the University of Calgary, Peter Facchini mulls over his latest
puzzle. He leads one of only two labs in the world that study opium
poppies, and has been asked to find a way for the Afghan government
to distinguish legal opium crops, used to produce medicine such as
morphine, from those used for heroin.

One method, he admits, sounds a little like science fiction:
"Inserting a genetic marker directly into the chromosomes of opium
poppies." Adding foreign DNA, in this case from a jellyfish, would do
nothing more than make the plant glow an unearthly, luminescent green
when exposed to ultraviolet light.

Alternately, Dr. Facchini envisions a system like the one devised by
Monsanto Co. with its Terminator strains. Sterile poppy seeds would
be allocated to farmers, allowing them to produce only one year's
crop and forcing them to rely on the government when it comes time to
plant again next year.

There is hesitation in Dr. Facchini's voice as he discusses his
findings. For the past decade and a half, he has researched just
about all there is to know about the opium poppy, but with this
latest Afghan challenge, he is unsure which approach to take.

"The science," he says cautiously, "is much less of a problem than
the political or social aspects of the situation."

Emmanuel Reinert would agree. He is the director of the Senlis
Council, a Paris-based drug-policy think-tank that also has some
ideas on what to do about the Afghan situation. The ideas are so
controversial that the charming Mr. Reinert spends much of his time
deflecting criticism from the United Nations, other members of the
international community and the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The council has a plan that would see the institution of an opium
licensing system in Afghanistan, and a conversion of opium used to
produce heroin into a legal cash crop: medical-grade morphine.

The money generated would help to stabilize Afghanistan's weak
central government, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the scheme has
ruffled many feathers. Ever since the release of its study's initial
findings (which included Dr. Facchini's research) at a Kabul
conference in September, the council has been working overtime to win converts.

"We received the initial response from the Ministry of
Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan, in which they were critical of the
project, but offered no specific arguments against it. All they said
was that it was too soon to think about licit opium and that the plan
would be 'disruptive,' " Mr. Reinert says.

"What does that say? Well, clearly the opium problem is not just a
drug problem. It's too big, it's multidimensional."

He argues that the sheer size of the drug trade -- Afghanistan
produces 87 per cent of the world's heroin -- makes it foolish to
have just one agency, be it the Afghan Counter-Narcotics Ministry or
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), deal with it.

"In a country where illegal drug cultivation represents about 60 per
cent of the economy, it's not a counter-narcotic problem. It's an
economic problem. Simply eradicating crops won't solve anything."

Mr. Reinert is particularly incensed by the UN agency's reaction to
the opium licensing study. Days after the study began last March,
Doris Buddenberg, the UNODC's country director for Afghanistan, sent
a scathing memo to Kabul's diplomatic community insisting that the
"arguments put forward by the Senlis Council with regard to
legalizing poppy cultivation . . . cannot be justified."

The study, she added, also "could stir confusion and raise false
expectations." More recently, the agency has dismissed the project as
a "pipe dream."

Supremely unimpressed, Mr. Reinert says that "the UNODC doesn't have
the right expertise to comment on this study, because this is not
just a counter-narcotics issue -- it's much more than that. It's
ridiculous to think that law enforcement can tackle the problem.
That's just a dangerous way of looking at it."

There are hints that some big players in Afghanistan are beginning to
recognize the dangers. The latest U.S. budget update shows Washington
plans serious cuts to its reconstruction work and military presence,
hoping that by this summer, the bulk of its responsibilities will
fall to North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and the Afghans.

That's good news for Mr. Reinert: Without the Americans to guide
drug-eradication efforts in the country, Afghan authorities may be
more at liberty to consider the plan to produce morphine.

In happier times, Kandahar was known as the breadbasket of Central
Asia, but the food crops have given way to vast fields of opium
poppies and land mines, the result of two decades of war that
destroyed the region's irrigation network and exacerbated the effects
of a decade-long drought.

The Canadian contingent, based in an abandoned fruit cannery in
Kandahar City, is a mix of personnel from the armed forces, Foreign
Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency. They work
together under the rubric of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT),
a model of development devised by the UN. Just a few kilometres from
PRT headquarters, the palace built by Osama bin Laden for Mullah
Omar, the mysterious head of the Taliban, still stands.

Recent years have been punctuated by Taliban offensives in the
region, and military observers predict that 2006 will be no
different. The Canadian Forces are taking no chances, with members of
the elite Joint Task Force 2 being brought in ahead of another
anticipated offensive. (No one knows exactly when, but it's expected by March.)

"It's a high-threat environment, that's for certain," says Colonel
Steve Bowes, the team's military commander. "We've been hit directly
by a suicide bomber. Does that make us different from the other
coalition forces? No. We're targeted because we're here to help the
Afghan government."

The PRT's three directors were Col. Bowes, Michael Callan of CIDA
and, of course, Mr. Berry, who was passionate about the perils of
eradicating opium production. "When the Taliban imposed a ban on
poppy cultivation, Afghanistan was producing 4,000 tonnes of opium,"
he said in the interview. "Within a year, that had dropped to three
tonnes. But that ban didn't make any long-term difference."

Instead, opium soon soared to new heights. Many observers believe
that, although the Taliban outlawed cultivation for one year, it was
just to draw greater profits from their tax on opium trafficking,
which wasn't covered by the ban.

Nowadays, although the links between Taliban insurgents and drug
traffickers in Afghanistan aren't perfectly clear, there is no doubt
the two groups have formed a dangerous symbiosis. Each benefits from
the other's undermining of the rule of law and power of the central
government. As well, Taliban gunmen have provided informal security
for drug traffickers in the south of the country in return for
profits from the opium trade.

Mr. Berry tried to undermine this dual threat. He made building
relationships with the community a priority, but was quick to point
out how the lack of infrastructure fuels the trade. "You can't
eradicate without preparing the ground well. I have talked to farmers
directly in the district. In a sense, the lack of water has been an
ally of the traffickers. Nothing grows better than poppy. It's
amazing. It's an incredibly aggressive crop."

He contended that the only way to overcome the problem is to apply an
even-handed, inclusive and long-term reconstruction. That way,
farmers won't be tempted to rebel and help the Taliban insurgency.
"The opium industry is like a lot of problems in Afghanistan -- it
goes back 25 years," he said. "But over time, I think we can make an impact."

To that end, CIDA workers have been quietly working all across the
province in the hopes of restoring communities' faith in a
post-Taliban Afghan government by offering incentives such as
training for alternative livelihoods, micro-credit loans and the
rebuilding of irrigation networks.

"Often, the only system whereby people can access credit is through
opium traffickers, who can only be paid back if the farmers grow
opium," Mr. Callan explains.

The PRT has set out to disrupt that system by providing loans itself
- -- and the approach seems to be working. In a recent survey, each
Afghan province recorded an increased level of poppy planting, except
Kandahar, where it decreased.

Mr. Reinert of the Senlis Council applauds Canada's efforts, but he
cautions that Canadian forces are in greater jeopardy than the public
has been led to believe.

The initial peacefulness of the PRT's mission was, he claims, due to
the Afghan government's decision to postpone forcible eradication.
Now Mr. Berry's death could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Last June, the first eradication campaign came to a bloody end on its
very first day when farmers in Kandahar took up arms and, backed by
insurgents, attacked and killed government officers. No significant
opium eradication has taken place since, but no one doubts that it is
on the way.

Providing farmers with a livelihood isn't the opium trade's only
Afghan legacy: The UN estimates there are more than a million drug
addicts in the country, many of them in Kabul.

As director of the Zindagi-e-Naowin (New Life) drug-treatment centres
in the capital and nearby Faizabad, Shairshah Bayan has devoted his
career to helping addicts. The treatment at his centres is what Dr.
Bayan terms "community-based." That is, 40 to 50 addicts at a time
are given medication, but they also take part in programs designed to
help them find work and rejoin the community.

However, one side effect of the drive to destroy the Afghan drug
trade has been to cut off the addicts' access to pain relievers. Dr.
Bayan says his clinics face a chronic shortage of medicine:
"Drug-control efforts predominantly focus on the reduction of supply,
often ignoring the important aspect of local drug demand as an
obstacle to development." Morphine and other painkillers, he says,
simply cost too much to prescribe. Afghanistan's opium crops could
provide the country with a stable supply of raw materials, of course,
but the Karzai government has, perhaps as a result of international
pressure, neglected to tap this resource.

To address the need for cheap medicine, Mr. Reinert of the Senlis
Council has proposed a form of "fair-trade" morphine that would
ensure cash-strapped countries of low-cost Afghan drugs. "Eighty per
cent of the world population has access to only 6 per cent of the
morphine produced," he says. "The seven richest countries are
consuming 77 per cent of current morphine. We have to look into that."

As well as addressing the global shortage of opium-based drugs, he
says, setting up preferential trade agreements between Afghanistan
and other developing countries would stimulate economic development.

Back in Calgary, Dr. Facchini isn't overly enthusiastic about the
notion of cut-rate Afghan morphine, if only because of the hostility
the concept has drawn from his contacts in the pharmaceutical
industry. (One company he works with raised the subject after seeing
the University of Calgary logo on the Senlis Council website.)

"I have a sense -- though I'm not an authority -- that the poppy
industry is not a thriving industry, and that these companies are
just holding their own," he explains. "They certainly don't need
someone to come along and start dumping cheap opium on the market."

His unease -- shared by a great majority of those opposed to the
opium licensing plan -- has been addressed by another Canadian
researcher working on the Senlis Council's study, Benedikt Fischer of
Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

A member of the team behind the prescription-heroin trial now being
conducted in Vancouver and Toronto, Dr. Fischer was handed the task
by the Senlis Council of assessing the current global need for
morphine. What he uncovered was an industry that acts much like a
cartel to keep prices artificially high.

Although concerned about creating an adequately secure system to
safeguard legal opium from Afghanistan's drug traffickers and
insurgents, Dr. Fischer believes that access to medicine should trump
other concerns. "The need really outsizes the supply when it comes to
morphine, but due to the strict regulations imposed by the UN, this
is a tightly controlled market and industry," he says. "The natural
demand and supply processes can't really meet each other."

Loosening the morphine market regulations and introducing a new
supplier will, Dr. Fischer hopes, make pain treatment affordable
around the world. The call for opium-based medicines, he says, will
only intensify in the coming years as developing countries expand
their treatment of pain for diseases such as HIV/AIDS.

For Mr. Reinert, the battle is just beginning -- what was initially
conceived as a short study has now been extended indefinitely, and
the Senlis Council is tendering contracts for researchers to explore
every facet of opium licensing in Afghanistan. More research,
however, is unlikely to uncover a solution to the central challenges
facing the council: effective security and a willingness to embrace
alternative solutions seem likely to decide the fate of their opium
licensing plan.

The situation on the ground, however, is shifting rapidly. With the
United States effectively bowing out of Afghanistan, the onus is on
other countries to come up with a solution before the drug trade,
coupled with the insurgency, causes Mr. Karzai's government to buckle.

But the Canadian mission, while shaken by Mr. Berry's death, seems
committed for the long term. Both Prime Minister Paul Martin and
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper have indicated that they intend to
continue the project in the face of increased violence, with Mr.
Martin calling it "essential for establishing peace and security" in
the region.

And a stabilizing force is necessary: Along with an unstable Iraq and
hostile Iran, an Afghan "narco-state" would further destabilize
Central Asia and worsen the region's already critical levels of
HIV/AIDS and heroin addiction.

Opium's addictive qualities are widely documented. Even Avicenna
discovered just how deadly it can be -- the good doctor himself died
of an accidental overdose.

Its powers as an agent of change may be much less apparent, but one
thing is clear: The poppy will determine the future of Afghanistan,
for better or for worse.

Writer and researcher Daniel Werb is working with the University of
Toronto's HIV-AIDS Africa Initiative.

Putting the poppy to good use

The Senlis Council has made a lot of waves in a relatively short
period of time. The drug think-tank was established in 2002, with
offices in Paris, London and Kabul and a staff of about 30 policy
analysts, researchers and logistics experts.

Small but ornate, the Paris facility serves as the Senlis HQ, replete
with gilded ceiling fixtures, wide, gold-framed wall mirrors, and an
impeccably dressed staff able to converse in French, English, German,
Spanish and Dari, the Afghan language.

Supported by the Network of European Foundations, made up of 12 large
foundations, the agency focuses its efforts on two major policy
areas: lobbying governments and the United Nations to adopt
health-based drug policies, and the realization of an opium licensing
system in Afghanistan.

Despite the council's relatively low profile, the Afghan project has
placed it in the limelight and made it the object of conjecture among
policy wonks the world over.