POPPIES VS. POWER IN AFGHANISTAN

The power to destroy does not carry within it the power to control. A
century of failed colonial rule and the American misadventure in
Vietnam etched that lesson on global consciousness for a time. It has
taken the huge problems that affluent, nuclear-armed nations are
encountering in the miserable ruins of Afghanistan and Iraq to drive
it home anew.

Call it the paradox of overwhelming but insufficient force. It is
surfacing in a struggle in Afghanistan over the wisdom of chemically
eradicating that nation's expanding poppy fields. They are the source
of (1) the livelihoods of many Afghan peasants, (2) a record flood of
heroin into Western markets and (3) funding for the Taliban and other
terrorist forces.

William Wood, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, has pushed so
aggressively for aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields that he
has been nicknamed "Chemical Bill" by NATO officers serving there.
President Bush posted Wood to Afghanistan after he oversaw a large
eradication-by-air project in Colombia, with mixed results.

Wood's priorities have divided U.S. and Afghan policymakers.
President Hamid Karzai's government fears both environmental damage
and the radicalizing political effect that a spraying program might
have on the peasants Karzai is trying to coax away from the Taliban.
For the moment, Karzai has gained the upper hand over the State
Department's narcotics bureau in this ongoing fight.

The argument over how abrupt and how harsh the anti-drug campaign in
Afghanistan should be is in fact part of fundamental disagreements
over strategy within NATO. Many alliance officials fear that an
approach they term as "with us or against us" and which seems to
emphasize firepower over reconciliation is proving to be unsustainable.

I first heard rumblings of this larger debate in London in October.
It has now been settled, at least as far as the British are
concerned. Speaking to Parliament on Dec. 12, Prime Minister Gordon
Brown endorsed Karzai's campaign to get midlevel Taliban operatives
to lay down their arms and seek reconciliation. Brown also outlined
an expanded development program targeted on the poppy-growing countryside.

The State Department's spray-first, reconcile-later tactics have
created divisions even within the Bush administration. Like the
British, the Pentagon is wary of abruptly destroying crops in areas
where there is little government control and no alternative
livelihoods immediately available.

"Spraying is not a long-term strategy," Defense Secretary Robert
Gates told a group of foreign officials in a private meeting some
weeks ago, according to notes taken at the meeting by a foreign
diplomat. Gates emphasized that he was stating his view, not settled
administration policy.

A long-term strategy involves convincing Afghan farmers that they can
find alternatives to growing poppies, Gates continued. For him, the
immediate focus has to be on preventing the corrosive effect of
drug-financed corruption seeping deeper into the Afghan government --
to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a narco-state that would fund
world terrorism in the way petro-states now do.

Spraying in Colombia did not diminish the flow of drugs from that
South American country. Gates and other U.S. officials credit
President Alvaro Uribe (and Wood's support for him) with "uprooting
corruption in government" and keeping it from tipping into the
narco-state category. Only in that sense could Colombia be a model
for Afghanistan.

The West will begin to resolve the grim and massive problems that the
international drug trade creates only when the United States and
Europe make justice rather than vengeance the center of drug laws,
create effective rehabilitation programs that fill hospitals rather
than jails and curb the demand for life- and soul-destroying
narcotics at home. Even a "successful" poppy eradication program in
Afghanistan would be no more than a bandage on a gaping wound, while
inflicting great damage on Karzai's government.

Afghanistan has been treated as a one-dimensional device in the
current U.S. presidential political season. Democrats use it to
establish that they are not pacifists, citing Afghanistan as a just
war that they endorse in contrast to Bush's invasion of Iraq, which
they deplore, and move on quickly. Republicans are little better on the stump.

But Afghanistan is an urgent, rapidly evolving crisis that demands
the attention and commitment of all candidates for national office.
So do America's overly harsh and counterproductive drug laws.

And so does the paucity of support for providing tax dollars for
prevention and rehabilitation rather than incarceration of simple
users. The American nation could give itself no better present in
this season than a thorough rethinking of its war on drugs and of
many aspects of its war on terror.