BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S DRUG WAR IN AFGHANISTAN IS A BUST

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 George W. 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 U.S. 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 Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the
United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime. "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 past year to an all-time high. The raw form of heroin is
now the staple crop in every province, and 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 that 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?

Robert Scheer is a columnist with Creators Syndicate.