THERE REMAINS THE SMALL MATTER OF THE OPIUM TRADE

So it's official. Afghanistan's vast fields of opium poppy will soon
be entirely wiped out. No more opium and heroin. Just melons and
happy farmers, as far as the eye can see.

Granted, the reader may have heard otherwise. The latest opium crop
was the biggest ever, the headlines reported. Ninety per cent of the
world's heroin supply comes from Afghanistan. Top officials from NATO
commanders to President Hamid Karzai have said the illicit drug trade
is so enormous and corrosive that it is a bigger threat to the future
of Afghanistan than the Taliban.

But that can't be true. Just look at the report of the Independent
Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan.

Released yesterday, the report acknowledges that opium poppy is "a
complicating factor." But in its 94 pages, it devotes precisely one
paragraph to the issue.

One can only conclude that John Manley's esteemed panel believes the
drug trade isn't a terribly important part of the equation in
Afghanistan. But no rational person could possibly believe this --
unless the trade has vanished like the morning dew. So that must be
the case. QED.

Amazingly, this stunning victory in the war on drugs was predicted.
In fact, it is right on schedule.

In 1998, the United Nations convened a massive special session at
which all the nations of the world committed to "eliminating or
significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the
cannabis plant, and the opium poppy by the year 2008." Well, 2008
just started and the drug trade has been wiped out. Happy new year.

OK, that's one way to explain the startling lack of attention given
to the opium trade by the Manley report. Here's another:

Those who wish to bring peace and development to Afghanistan face an
insoluble dilemma. On the one hand, the poppy industry is the
country's largest. Afghanistan may be horribly poor now, but removing
the income generated by the poppy industry would make vast numbers of
very poor people very much poorer. This is why most NATO officers are
adamantly opposed to taking aggressive action against poppy
production: It would drive every small farmer, field hand and trader
into the waiting arms of the insurgents.

It would also be futile. Any reduction in the poppy crop would cause
prices to rise along the entire supply chain -- from farm field to
street retailer. Rising prices would draw farmers and traffickers
back into the trade.

The tempting conclusion is that we should simply turn a blind eye.
But that's not an option, either. The money the Taliban make "taxing"
farmers and traffickers pays for wages, weapons and bombs. And the
industry is a fountainhead of corruption -- corruption that makes
improved governance and development difficult or impossible.

"Military victories will count for little unless the Afghan
government, with the help of others, can improve governance and
provide better living conditions for the Afghan people," the Manley
report correctly noted. But how can the Afghan government do that?
It's impossible if it doesn't tackle the opium industry. And if it
does, the government will turn the people against it.

It's a heck of a dilemma. What's the Manley report got to say about it?

Nothing, really. "Coherent counter-narcotics strategies need to be
adopted by all relevant authorities," it says without noting what
those mysterious strategies might be.

There should also be "effective economic provisions to induce
would-be poppy farmers and middlemen to prefer and find alternative
lines of work." The report also suggests that "a limited
poppy-for-medicine project might be worth pursuing."

The objections to these progressive-sounding ideas are obvious.
First, the profitability gap between poppy and legal crops is
enormous, so economic incentives to encourage farmers and middlemen
to switch would have to be equally enormous. Experience elsewhere
suggests they usually aren't big enough to do the job. But even if
they are, they are self-defeating: If farmers start abandoning poppy
in substantial numbers, poppy prices will rise and those rising
prices will eventually drag farmers right back in.

Poppy-for-medicine is a mistake for the same reason: If substantial
quantities of poppy are diverted from the illegal trade to the legal
market, prices for black-market poppy will rise and illegal
production will respond accordingly. The laws of economics will not be denied.

So how does the Manley report respond to these objections? It
doesn't. It avoids serious discussion of the opium problem and in
that way it dodges the dilemma at the very heart of the matter.

To use a hackneyed phrase, the Manley report is inside-the-box
thinking. Here, the box is the criminalization of opium poppy.

It was criminalization that turned a crop that has been grown
peacefully in central Asia since time immemorial into a source of
instability and corruption. It was criminalization that helped create
the dilemma Afghanistan finds itself in now.

But the Manley report doesn't consider that criminalization is a
policy choice made almost a century ago by foolish people who had no
idea what hell they were unleashing. It treats criminalization as a
law of nature, like gravity -- something that has always existed and
always will. And that's even more foolish than the decision to
criminalize in the first place.

We choose our drug policies. And the choice of criminalization has
created in insoluble dilemma in Afghanistan -- a dilemma that is
killing Canadian soldiers.

There are alternatives. Remember the 2008 deadline for wiping out the
global drug trade? This year, the UN will review the experience of
the last decade and discuss the way forward. Of course, the UN will
never admit its policies have failed spectacularly. In fact, it now
claims that the goal set in 1998 was not "eliminating or
significantly reducing" production, but rather to achieve
"significant and measurable results" in drug control. That's a lie,
but moving the goalposts is very much in the interests of those whose
salaries depend on keeping the status quo.

The Manley report could have identified the Afghan dilemma squarely.
It could have shown how international drug policy helped create that
dilemma. It could have called on the Canadian government to work with
European governments and others disenchanted with the war on drugs to
turn the UN's 2008 review into a serious re-examination of drug
policy from top to bottom.

It could have challenged us all to think.

But it didn't. It just hunkered down in that damned old box and closed the lid.