U.S. LETS AFGHANISTAN TRAFFIC IN OPIUM

In the new Afghanistan, women are free to go to school. Refugees are
free to return home. Regional chieftains are free to run in upcoming
elections. And farmers are free to grow opium poppies for the
international heroin trade.

This last freedom has expanded unchecked since U.S. military
intervention unseated the repressive Taliban regime, which tamped down
the illicit crop as contrary to Islam. Now this freedom to farm
threatens all others.

The poppies grow under our noses. The robust narco-economy is the
source of half of Afghanistan's economic output. As the underground
economy grows, so does the power of regional warlords - including the
resurgent Taliban. Eighty-four percent of poppy production, said Larry
Goodson, an Afghan expert at the U.S. Army War College, takes place in
provinces now controlled by the Taliban and two other factions opposed
to the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai.

"It's coming out of those areas, it's helping to fund their
resurgence," said Goodson, who has served as an observer of Afghan
elections.

Afghanistan was the source of more than three-quarters of the world's
illicit opium last year, according to the United Nations - a bumper
crop that farmers intend to surpass this year. Fully 69 percent of
farmers told United Nations officials that they intend to increase
poppy cultivation in 2004.

The math is simple. The average net income for a farmer who grew
poppies last year was $2,520, according to the UN. A farmer growing
only legitimate crops earned $670.

In provinces where the United States has turned over security to
warlords - that is, in most of the country outside the capital of
Kabul - the warlords pay farmers high prices for poppies and extend
them credit. The chieftains' profits finance weaponry for regional
militias, potential rivals of any central Afghan army. They provide a
wellspring of cash for terrorist groups, including al- Qaida. With an
international squeeze on the flow of terrorist money through financial
institutions, what better conduit than the untraceable economy of the
drug trade?

"The marriage between the drug traffickers and the terrorists has
taken place," said Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens), the ranking Democrat
on the House International Affairs Committee.

Afghanistan now is seen as a potential Colombia, both dependent upon
and corrupted by drug trafficking. There is agreement, even, on how
this has come to pass.

The U.S. invasion unseated the Taliban but cleared the way for
regional fiefdoms and militias to control the provinces. The warlords
were kept in place by explicit plan - they were to secure the regions
so we would not have to do it ourselves.

There would be no Soviet-style occupation of Afghanistan to complicate
the American mission of hunting down al-Qaida. The U.S. military
presence was deliberately kept small and focused on tracking
terrorists. Only recently was it enlarged in an effort to dislodge the
reconstituted Taliban, Goodson said.

Nor, despite official pronouncements, would there really be a
"Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan. Development aid has been scarce and
slow in reaching the country. Lack of security outside Kabul has made
it difficult for aid workers. Security is so poor that elections
originally scheduled for June have been pushed into September.

Turning a haven for terrorists into a haven for drug traffickers was
not in the plan. It isn't what the American people supported when they
were called, after 9/11, to rise to the moment. They sent their sons
and daughters to battle and their pennies and quarters to the Afghan
children for a cause nobler than this.

There is nothing noble in abandoning a nation to gangsters. We say we
will not do that in Iraq, yet we are following this road to perdition
in Afghanistan.

We knew that rebuilding Afghanistan was an enormous and expensive
task. Now we shirk a responsibility we created for ourselves. Failure
to meet it now will only bring consequences later.