AFGHAN DRUG TRADE: TERROR IN THE WINGS

WASHINGTON - The United States is scoring a major victory against
terrorism in the war in Afghanistan, but until the US successfully
tackles that country's drug-trafficking problem it cannot call the
victory permanent.

Drug dealers and arms traders are natural allies; their presence in
Afghanistan and throughout Central Asia undermines already-weak
states and gives militant Islamic groups the means for self-financing.

Afghanistan has been the world's largest grower of poppies for opium
and heroin, largely destined for sale in Europe. Though cultivation
was banned briefly by the Taliban, Afghan drug dealers are back in
business.

US bombing raids never directly targeted Afghanistan's drug-storage
or heroin-producing facilities, and Afghanistan's drug dealers were
fast off the mark, distributing seed or cash to purchase it in the
fall. They are now primed to buy up the crop, and are inciting local
farmers to oppose violently the government's efforts to seize it.

Meanwhile, there is still no US strategy to deal with Afghanistan's
return to narco-trafficking and only a trickle of assistance money in
the pipeline to counter it. The US timetable for rebuilding
Afghanistan must coincide with the way in which risks are generated
and not merely be fashioned after Washington's annual budget cycle.

Unless the growing opium and heroin trade from Afghanistan through
Central Asia is curbed, anti-state groups will continue to have a
ready source of funding, including groups in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai has banned opium-growing, but
lacks the money and capacity to enforce his policy successfully. Most
local warlords still profit from narco-trafficking by taxing the crop
or its transit. Until a national military and police force is
trained, Afghanistan must rely on outsiders to enforce the ban, or
see it largely ignored.

Current US policy ensures that the latter will be the case, or worse,
that the ban will help destabilize the Karzai government, since the
Bush administration opposes the creation of a large international
security force, whose mandate spans all of Afghanistan.

Tolerating the rebirth of the drug trade transforms the tragedy of
Afghanistan's poverty into a problem of regional and eventually
global security. One should not minimize how difficult it would be to
cut drug protection sharply in Afghanistan. The network of drug
dealers is fully intertwined with the traditional local elite. No
crop will produce the same income, nor allow a rapacious elite the
same easy riches.

Working with the provisional government, the US should work
aggressively to halt poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
Crop-substitution projects must gain priority; Afghan farmers should
be offered reasonable cash subsidies for destroying the harvest in
the field, or for turning it over for destruction. Those who comply
should qualify for agricultural reform programs, while those who
refuse should lose priority for receiving all forms of development
assistance.

Alongside the provisional government, the US should also destroy
current stores of opium and then close down heroin factories.
Warlords allied with the US's Afghan military effort must pledge to
remain "drug free," the US must devote the intelligence resources to
monitoring this.

Otherwise, the US may wind up being the inadvertent regulator of the
very drug trade that it should be stamping out, as US forces could
have to adjudicate between feuding warlords.

Although some funds were recently allocated for eradicating the
current crop, the US approach emphasizes interdiction on Central
Asia's borders, since more than half of Afghan drugs exit into those
states. But current allocations and their promised supplements meet a
fraction of these countries' training needs. Tajikistan and
Turkmenistan already qualify as "narco-states," as their governments
have credibly been accused of sifting profits from the drug trade.
And although Tajikistan's new national drug-control agency has
sharply improved interdiction rates, funds for this UN-sponsored
project run out this year.

Afghanistan's drug trade feeds on Central Asia's poverty. Without
concerted action, these fragile states' problems could fester just
when the West is planning to tap Caspian oil and gas reserves =F1
reserves whose delivery could be compromised by instability in this
land-locked region.

The fight against terrorism cannot hope to succeed unless the US
remains as alert to preventing tomorrow's terrorists from
consolidating as it is to defeating the current threat. As in the
other battlefields of the war on terror, the US must be prepared to
deal a blow to the Afghan drug trade, even if Washington must assume
a disproportionate share of the financial burden.

Martha Brill Olcott is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace and author of 'Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled
Promise' (Carnegie, 2002).