LEARN TO LOVE AFGHAN POPPIES

The "War on Drugs" is a cheap, race-baiting, election-year talking
point for tough-on-crime demagogues, and everybody knows it.

The money and talent we waste on this vapid struggle is bad enough.
But it's now threatening to waste a lot of lives as well and doom our
fight against theocracy and terrorism in Afghanistan to a humiliating
defeat.

Yes, it took five years of relentless lobbying, but the Bush
administration has very nearly persuaded the reluctant President Hamid
Karzai, Afghanistan's embattled leader, to spray the country's illicit
poppy fields with massive quantities of herbicides, The New York Times
reported last week.

I honestly can't think of a better way to sabotage the Afghan war
effort.

The Times credulously described the country's "drug problem" as "out
of control," noting that 93 percent of the world's illegal opiate
supply is now exported from Afghanistan. And worse yet, the article
intones, the poppy yield grew by 17 percent in the past year alone.

Considered without context, these statistics miss the point -- the
problem is not that Afghans are forging an economic niche for
themselves. The problem is that, for no good reason, 100 percent of
the revenues generated by this thriving trade fall into criminal hands.

The resurgent Taliban, which nearly eradicated poppy production during
its reign, has collected billions of dollars in "taxes" from
international drug traffickers operating in the territory it now
controls. They're using this income base to revamp their militias and
build a power center of public support to challenge Karzai's tenuous
hold on power.

They aim to retake the country bit by bit. And with Washington's help,
they may very well succeed.

The U.S. political class is notoriously handcuffed by the "War on
Drugs." The endless repetition of the vacuous (but eminently
tough-sounding) rhetoric of the drug war has squished and contorted
the realm of mainstream debate -- only "enforcement," at varying
degrees of severity, may be discussed by anyone who wants to survive
the next election.

Dissenters to the administration's herbicide spraying policy,
therefore, have confined themselves to one of the weakest criticisms
imaginable: Isn't the proposed chemical a bit too toxic? (It's not.)

The reality is that eradication just isn't an acceptable option. The
widescale use of any herbicide will enrage the local population and
spell disaster for Karzai, NATO and the United States.

In an excellent article for last June's New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson,
who was embedded with armed contractors hired to destroy family poppy
plots, spelled out the driving force behind the exponential growth of
Afghanistan's opiate trade: Where an acre of wheat earns a farmer $33,
an acre of poppies brings in more than $500. You can't argue with
economics like that.

Opiate production accounts for one-third of the Afghan GDP. Rather
than trying to destroy what remains of the country's economy and
losing a war in the process, why not try to rebuild it? It requires
two steps:

First, legalize poppy harvests. Stop pressuring Karzai to make war on
his own impoverished country. Doing so would bring the trade into the
open and help clean up the country's corrupt bureaucracy.

Second, buy it all up. We can outspend Islamist drug traffickers, and
providing a steady source of income will win the loyalty of the Afghan
people. Selling poppy products will not only create a sizable pool of
cash to invest in Afghanistan's development but also bring down prices
on opiate-based pharmaceuticals worldwide.

According to the Senlis Council, a drug policy think tank with a
permanent office in Kabul, a nearly identical program in Turkey in the
1970s was extremely successful. Today, the group is fiercely lobbying
the State Department to implement such a program in
Afghanistan.

But will it be successful? U.S. politicians have an infamous habit of
inventing "wars" that, by definition, cannot be won -- on poverty, on
crime, etc. However, winning the war against theocratic tyranny and
terrorism deserves to be taken seriously.

The "War on Drugs" is a futile, paranoid vendetta against the fact
that human beings like to get high, and it's undermining our real war
against real enemies. Is it worth abandoning an entire country to
religious gangsters to keep "fighting" it?