THE PERILS OF LIBERATING AFGHANISTAN: A NEW FLOOD OF OPIUM/HEROIN WORLDWIDE

This is what we'll have to admit to be the next source of danger from
liberated Afghanistan. It's not the "Golden Triangle" of Thailand, Laos and
Burma, but the "Muslim Crescent", which includes the Tribal Areas of
Northwest Pakistan, Afghanistan, and southern Iran, which provide the bulk
of the world's opium.

It's true that a few weeks ago, a consortium of 40 or more aid-donor
countries pledged Afghanistan, through Karzai, assistance amounting to an
initial $4.5 billion (out of $15 billion needed over the next decade) to
rebuild Afghanistan and help feed its starving and refugee millions. The
fact is that, with the four-year drought being lifted with the first snows
and rainfalls, the Afghans will now return to their original cash crop - the
cultivation of poppies and other narcotic plants.

USA Today (Jan. 20) warned that "when the poppies bloom in three to four
months, (poppy growers) will milk the hardened capsule within each blossom.
The white liquid will be rendered into opium, which some distant laboratory
will process into heroin for addicts, primarily in Europe.

"Over the years . . . small-scale backyard cultivation has multiplied a
thousandfold in Afghanistan, producing as much as 5,000 metric tons of opium
in peak years."

The newspaper, whose correspondent Gregg Zoroya interviewed an elderly
farmer in Kandahar, once a stronghold of the Taliban, elicited from Abdul
Ghafer, 70, the information that he hopes to earn as much as $16,000 from
his crop. Notes Zaroya: "In a country where the per capita gross domestic
product is $800" that's a tempting proposition.

The US daily revealed that the US used to bribe the Taliban to halt
cultivation of poppies. As late as May last year, the US government gave the
Taliban $43 million in aid as a "reward" for banning poppy-growing. (Up to a
year ago, Afghanistan had supplied three-quarters of the world's opium -
including 90 percent of all opium and heroin peddled in Europe!)

Now, let's brace ourselves for a return by Afghan growers - in their
desperation - to this lucrative cash crop.