THE 'FRUITS' OF VICTORY

The Bush administration has unwittingly made it possible for narco-
terrorists to flood America with cheaper, purer heroin.

America rescued Afghanistan from the Taliban. Now who will rescue America
from Afghanistan's heroin?

It is a bitter irony that, in pursuing the war against terrorism, the Bush
administration has unwittingly made it possible for narco- terrorists to
flood American communities with increasingly cheaper, and increasingly
purer, heroin.

Indeed, recent news reports indicate that the heroin that is reaching
America from Afghanistan is so pure that it can be snorted rather than
injected.

"The heroin that we all knew from the 1960s was 30 percent pure. To
generate a high, it had to be injected," U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told
the Chicago Tribune recently. "That created an almost insurmountable
barrier for drug dealers to sell to suburban kids who had a huge aversion
to needles."

Now, however, snortable heroin is becoming such a problem in Kirk's
suburban Chicago district and elsewhere that he wants the Bush
administration to be more aggressive about wiping out the booming poppy
growing trade in U.S. occupied Afghanistan.

"As recently as last year, only 8 percent of heroin from Afghanistan
reached the United States," Kirk told the Tribune. "Last year's crop was
the largest in human history, all of it coming out of one country and
flooding this country."

Thus is America "rewarded" for delivering Afghanistan from the clutches of
the Taliban.

Part of the problem is that Bush is reluctant to put too much pressure on
the still struggling government of President Hamid Karzai. Although Karzai
has pleaded with farmers not to grow poppies - pointing out that profiting
from narcotics runs counter to Muslim teachings - poverty-stricken Afghans
cannot resist the prices their crops fetch. And Karzai will not support
more direct eradication methods, like aerial spraying.

"The administration does not have a clear plan on this right now," Kirk
complains.

While U.S. forces in Afghanistan may understandably be more preoccupied
with the prospect of a renewed Taliban insurgency than the resurgence of
the international heroin trade, it is simply an unacceptable tradeoff that
one of the "fruits" of victory in Afghanistan must be a flood of cheap,
pure, addictive heroin into America's streets and neighborhoods.

Neither may the war on drugs be considered separately from that on
terrorism itself, because the profits of the heroin trade are just as
likely to support terrorist organizations as drug barons.

Cutting the new heroin pipeline from Afghanistan to the United States
cannot take a back seat to mopping up the remnants of the Taliban. The
objectives must be considered one and the same.