AFGHAN DRUGS A NATO CONCERN GRAHAM SAYS

OTTAWA -- Coming to grips with Afghanistan's booming narcotics trade is
NATO's next big challenge in the country, Defence Minister Bill Graham said
yesterday.

But troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- including a large
Canadian contingent being redeployed over the coming year -- can't take
over domestic policing duties in a country desperately in need of social
order beyond the precincts of the capital, Kabul.

Mr. Graham, in Brussels for a meeting of NATO defence ministers, said
combatting the drug trade while establishing firm rules of engagement was a
major topic of discussions this week.

"All the NATO ministers recognize that our troops cannot go in and spray
[opium poppy] fields and arrest drug traffickers and things like that," Mr.
Graham said. "That's a police matter for the Afghan police to do. But our
people can create a situation of security where the police can go in and do
that."

NATO can also help train local police, Mr. Graham said said.

But providing police security and training, while refraining from actual
police operations, is far more complicated on the ground than in theory.

"That's why we have to have clear rules of engagement . . . that all the
NATO partners subscribe to," Mr. Graham said.

The first 250 Canadian soldiers of a provincial reconstruction team will
head into the lawless territory around Kandahar in southern Afghanistan
this summer. By next year, Canada will have more than 1,000 troops in the
country.

It will be a far different deployment than Canada's last, which wrapped up
about a year ago in Kabul. While Afghanistan's fledgling democratic
government is finding its legs, the growing poppy trade is creating a new
set of problems far from the capital.

The country is a prime feeder of the international heroin market, providing
more than 75 per cent of the world's opium poppy crop.

The acreage of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is believed to have
quadrupled over the past three years.

That puts a strain on more than just Afghanistan's fragile social structures.

There was also a geopolitical dimension to this week's NATO discussion,
because Britain holds the presidency of the G8 this year and is making the
global drug trade one of its major concerns.

It's a difficult sell to tell NATO troops, including the British, that they
can't arrest traffickers in Afghanistan, where poppies are grown
commercially in 28 of 32 provinces, Mr. Graham suggested.

"There's a Catch-22 in all this because ultimately we recognize that if we
don't solve the drug problem, the whole object of bringing stability to
Afghanistan is itself being threatened."