FAILED STATE BLOOMING

The Bush administration's decision to conduct a review of security,
governance and economic development in Afghanistan reflects an
overdue recognition that, six years after the overthrow of the
Taliban, the country remains dangerously unstable. With Taliban
attacks on the rise and the opium poppy crop increasing, Afghanistan
is on the way to becoming a failed state, a narco-state or both.

The easy part of the policy review should be identifying past
mistakes. An obvious error was the light military footprint that
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to maintain after the
Taliban were chased into Pakistan. The ratio of peacekeeping forces
to population in Afghanistan is a tiny fraction of what it was in
Bosnia or Kosovo.

At the same time, notorious warlords were absorbed into the
well-intentioned government of President Hamid Karzai. Their
depredations, and the impunity they enjoyed, fostered resentment of
the government. Inexcusably, the United States and its NATO allies
failed to devote the time and resources needed for training
professional police forces that would protect, and not prey upon, the
civilian population.

Making matters worse, the outside powers delivered less economic
development funding than they promised, and that money was often
spent in the wrong way. The aim should have been to create jobs at
living wages for young Afghan men who would thus be encouraged to
turn in their guns. They ought to have been put to work building
badly needed roads, irrigation facilities, and other projects. Credit
for those projects should have gone principally, even ostentatiously,
to the Karzai government.

But these things never happened, and now the Taliban have made a
comeback in the south and east of the country. With Afghanistan now
accounting for 93 percent of the world's opium supply,
narco-corruption is seeping into every level of governance. And the
Taliban are financing a large part of their operations from their cut
of the heroin trade.

A bad idea that the policy review should reject is the drug-war
prescription for eradicating poppy crops with aerial spraying, as in
Bolivia or Colombia. This is a sure formula for driving poor farmers
into the arms of the Taliban. It would be cheaper and politically
shrewder to buy the entire poppy crop for a few years, using it to
supplement global supplies of morphine....

To shore up the Afghan government, the United States and NATO ...
will have to dig in for the long haul. That is the price to be paid
for the mistakes of the past.