UP AGAINST AFGHANISTAN'S CORROSIVE OPIUM TRADE

During a brief visit to Afghanistan last week, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld warned that the country's resurgent opium trade could derail
efforts to establish stable democratic rule. Without going into any details,
he added that a "master plan" is being developed to help the Afghan
government curtail poppy cultivation and snuff out a booming trade that is
pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of local warlords
and terrorist groups.

Such a plan is long overdue, but it cannot succeed separately from the
economic and political reconstruction of the country.

Despite promises to the contrary, it is plain that Washington did not have a
coherent strategy for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld and
his top Defence Department officials determined at the outset of the war in
2001 that the U.S. focus in Afghanistan should be almost exclusively on the
military matters at hand: the defeat of the Taliban regime, the hunt for
al-Qaeda operatives and the subsequent redeployment of as many troops as
possible to Iraq. Afterward, scant attention -- and far too little money --
was devoted to such crucial problems as how to extend the rule of law
throughout the country, disarm the warlords who still control huge swaths of
territory, and develop the institutions needed to underpin a functioning
democracy and a national economy.

It was in this economic and political vacuum that the drug trade flourished.

That might have been avoided if a comprehensive anti-drug strategy had been
in place soon after the rapid defeat of the Taliban, which had ruthlessly
tried to suppress poppy-growing. But once opium production was allowed to
take root again, it grew rapidly into a major force, with global
implications for the wars on drugs and terror.

At a time when other opium centres such as Myanmar have been reducing
output, Afghanistan boosted production by about 8 per cent last year to
3,600 tonnes, by far the world's biggest supply.

The United Nations is forecasting an even larger harvest this year. The
country's network of drug producers, smugglers and traffickers accounted for
three-quarters of the world's heroin in 2003 and raked in $2.3-billion
(U.S.), about half the value of Afghanistan's legal economy and growing much
faster.

Mr. Rumsfeld rightly fears that the enormous illicit income will be used to
finance opposition groups seeking to undermine the scheduled Oct. 9 national
election and the government that emerges from it. That's the immediate
threat. Beyond that, UN drug monitors fear that Afghanistan could simply
collapse into an utterly ungovernable state controlled by the narcotics
traffickers and their political allies.

In a blunt assessment of the situation, Republican Senator Richard Lugar,
chairman of the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee, declared in May
that "the same sources of conflict and instability that allowed the Taliban
to seize power and fuelled the growth of al-Qaeda's terrorist network
continue to threaten the future of Afghanistan. Conflicts among heavily
armed militias controlled by warlords, pervasive poverty, systemic
corruption and an increasingly entrenched narco-economy threaten to
undermine reconstruction activities."

Mr. Rumsfeld's department is reviewing its Afghan policy.

But officials have no plans to commit any U.S. troops specifically to a war
on drug trafficking, because they are already overextended by the fight
against insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. As for the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, it would be hard pressed to take on much more
than its current, problem-plagued peacekeeping role.

Mr. Rumsfeld has not said how he expects to put a serious dent in the
booming illicit trade without U.S. or NATO military intervention. If he is
counting on the understaffed, overstretched and untested Afghan army to do
it, he is making a serious error.

And if he thinks the feeble government of President Hamid Karzai will
somehow be emboldened enough to go after those profiting most from the drug
trade, he has not been paying sufficient attention to history.

U.S. President George W. Bush has called Afghanistan a model for what can be
achieved in Iraq. Let's hope he's wrong.