AFGHAN DRUG TRADE BOOMING

Why am I such a party pooper? Trust me, I desperately want to be like those
happy-go-lucky folks in the red states who apparently think things are
hurtling along just fine. Unfortunately, the facts keep bridling my optimism.

Take the United States' alleged great achievements in Afghanistan. Remember
during the campaign how President Bush repeatedly celebrated the divinely
inspired success of his administration toward turning Afghanistan into a
stable democracy? "In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a
gift from the Almighty," he said in the third presidential debate. "And I
can't tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march." As
compared with Iraq, which Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" has aptly titled
"Mess-O-Potamia," Afghanistan has claimed fewer American lives and taxpayer
dollars, while managing to hold a presidential election since U.S. and
warlord irregulars deposed the brutal Taliban regime three years ago.

Sure, we haven't captured Osama bin Laden or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed
Omar, and 20,000 young American soldiers are rather miserably stationed
there, but who am I to nitpick when faced with the stirring sight of
democracy abloom?

Well, truth is, freedom in Afghanistan continues to be on more of a
stoned-out stumble than a brisk march. The Taliban has been driven from
Kabul, but it still exists in the countryside, and the bulk of the country
is still run, de facto, by competing warlords dependent on the opium trade
- - which now accounts for 60 percent of the Afghan economy.

"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly
becoming a reality," said the executive director of the United Nations'
Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa. "Opium cultivation, which
has spread like wildfire ... could ultimately incinerate everything:
democracy, reconstruction and stability."

Costa's office has just released a slew of discouraging numbers that lay
out in numbing detail how Afghanistan's opium production has soared in the
last year to an all-time high. The raw form of heroin is now the staple
crop in every province, while in just one year the area under poppy
cultivation has increased 64 percent. The country produces 87 percent of
the world's opium, and one out of 10 Afghans is employed by the illicit
industry, according to the alarming U.N. report.

Of course, brandishing quotes from the United Nations doesn't sit well with
isolationist yahoos. So, for them, here are highlights from the White
House's own Office of National Drug Control Policy report, which recently
painted an even darker picture: "Current (Afghan opium) cultivation levels
equate to a ... 239 percent increase in the poppy crop and a 73 percent
increase in potential opium production over 2003 estimates" - a sixfold
increase in the three years since the Taliban was driven from Kabul.

No matter whom you listen to, then, the drug war in Afghanistan is a bust.
Unfortunately, both the United Nations and the White House have repeatedly
said the drug war and the war on terror are nearly synonymous, especially
in Afghanistan, where drug money has long directly and indirectly aided and
abetted extremists such as al-Qaida.

Indeed, this administration came into office preoccupied by the war on
drugs and indifferent to the war on terror. Before 9/11, even though
Afghanistan was harboring the world's No. 1 terror suspect and his
organization, the White House was so happy with the Taliban regime's
drug-trade crackdown that Secretary of State Colin Powell announced in May
2001 that the United States was extending $43 million in humanitarian aid
to Kabul, under U.N. auspices, as a reward.

Now that it has the war on terror as a perfect excuse for such wildly risky
fantasies as the wholesale remaking of the Middle East at gunpoint, winning
the drug war in Afghanistan is no longer even on the White House's radar.
Never mind that the drug trade is booming in Afghanistan and those who
harbored bin Laden and al-Qaida are regrouping.

In the opium haze that threatens to swallow up Afghanistan's vaunted
rebirth, it is only the illusion of progress - not progress itself - that
is being sold. Because the president has presented all this as a wonderful
dream instead of a nightmare that Afghanistan has had before, it raises the
question: Just what is he smoking?

* Scheer writes a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times.