DRUGS OF WAR

A new sort of jihad was called for this week by Afghanistan's likeable but
weak president, Hamid Karzai. Speaking after the Berlin conference of
international aid donors, Mr Karzai said that his country's recovery will
require a holy war against "warlordism and poppy cultivation". There could
be no sustainable security "unless the society is free of narcotics and
irresponsible armed groups".

No one disputes that the problem of opium production has got vastly worse
since the war which ousted the Taliban. As has been well documented by the
UN Office on Drugs and Crime, opium production rose twentyfold in two years
after being sharply reduced by the Taliban in its last year in power. Yet
this embarrassing truth is subtly shaded in Washington, which minimises the
drug-trafficking role of the Afghan warlords - whom the war restored to
power - while playing up the alleged involvement of Taliban remnants and
associated "terrorist groups". Robert Charles, the state department's top
counter-narcotics official, spoke last week of "the traffickers and the
terrorists they feed", as if they were the real problem.

Mr Karzai should be congratulated on identifying the true culprits. Just
how much the international anti-drugs effort (in which Britain is the lead
nation) can do about it is another matter. In February Britain sponsored an
anti-drugs conference in Kabul at which Afghan officials made a despairing
appeal. More technical aid, though badly needed, would not be enough, they
said, without "a powerful centre (of government) to exert control over the
provinces and support action at the local level".

No amount of "public awareness campaigns" is going to solve the drug
problem unless the warlords - whom ordinary Afghanis remember as killers
before the Taliban took over - can be curbed. The experienced journalist
Kathy Gannon paints a devastating picture of their role in the current
issue of Foreign Affairs: "All these men share responsibility for the
ferocious killing of the mid-1990s [before the Taliban took over]," she
writes. "They still maintain private armies and private jails, and are
reaping vast amounts of money from Afghanistan's illegal opium trade ..."

The Berlin conference has now pledged the sort of aid that Afghanistan
needed two years ago. There are also signs that the US may have begun to
reduce its reliance on the warlords. But Afghanistan has become the
half-forgotten war before Iraq: the drugs disaster is only one of its
disturbing lessons which have yet to be learned.