NARCO-STATE

Last week, President Bush proudly announced that "Afghanistan is no
longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world."

He's right. Instead of churning out terrorists, Afghanistan is
churning thousands of tons of opium out into the world. According to
the United Nations, poppy production in Afghanistan is now 20 times
what it was when the fundamentalist Taliban ruled the country.

It is a terrible irony: The Bush administration hopes and promises
that democracy will take root in liberated Iraq. But what about
Afghanistan? U.S. troops routed the Taliban even before President Bush
launched his war against Iraq. Is democracy flourishing in
Afghanistan?

Not exactly. Instead, what seems to be taking root in that
mountainous, poverty-stricken country is a narco-state. Afghanistan is
once again becoming the world's leading producer of opium, supplying
70 percent of the global market, or about $2.3 billion worth of "product."

Poppy fields are reportedly taking the place of wheat crops in 28 of
the country's 32 provinces. There is already talk of Afghanistan
becoming an Asian Colombia, a narco-state destined to be ruled by
powerful criminal syndicates.

As one Afghan opium trader told the Christian Broadcasting Service
recently, "In Afghanistan there are no factories or industry in which
we can work, there is no other business." And a poppy farmer told CBN,
"We keep hearing about aid coming to our country, but none of it
reaches us, so we keep growing poppies."

While America pours troops and billions of dollars into
nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan is quietly reverting to its
pre-Taliban status as drug supplier to the world. And ironically, some
news reports indicate that poppy profits are going to support
terrorists groups such as al- Qaeda.

Afghanistan's weak government, officially, discourages poppy
production. But with drug production generating half of the country's
gross domestic product - with Afghanistan literally existing on a
criminalized economy - the warlords who rule the country are not
anxious to interfere.

Recently, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes began
negotiating with border nations on a plan to erect an anti-drug
"security belt" around Afghanistan. But UNODC director Antonio Maria
Costa predicts that eradicating the poppy trade in Afghanistan could
take an entire generation.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has dispatched veteran Drug
Enforcement Administration intelligence chief Harold D. "Doug" Wankel
to coordinate anti-drug operations out of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Thus the war against terrorism morphs into the war against drugs.

Will the legacy of America's "liberation" of Afghanistan from
religious fundamentalists turn out to be its conversion, not into a
democracy, but a narco-state? If that happens, it will represent a
colossal failure of American foreign policy.