BUSH'S WAR ON DRUGS

As speeches about drugs go, the terse message that President George W. Bush
recently delivered to America's junkies began on a familiar note. Drugs
were bad, he said while signing a nickel-and-dime bill to fund rehab clinics.

Bush went on to break new ground, however. Adopting the stern tone and grim
visage normally reserved for pronouncements about the justice awaiting
Osama bin Laden, he continued: "It's important for Americans to know that
trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror, sustaining terrorists;
if you quit drugs, you join the fight against terrorism."

Lest reporters conclude that Bush was simply minting fresh cliches, aides
were at pains to stress that, unlike previous administrations, this
President was in earnest. From now on, they said, the drug war would be
treated as a second front in the campaign against terror.

These were bold words indeed, and not simply because all previous efforts
to stop Americans getting high have been costly failures.

Any serious war on drugs will demand Bush find an answer to an issue that
has bedevilled policymakers since the 1960s: Just how blind an eye should
Washington turn to the drug-dealing activities of those it counts as friends?

In Vietnam, the CIA placed Air America, its wholly-owned subsidiary, at the
service of anti-communist opium growers in the Golden Triangle. In Reagan's
clandestine war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, it was the Contras'
turn to run drugs while the US sheriff looked the other way. In Panama,
dictator Manuel Noriega's control of drugs flowing through his country on
their way to the eager noses of el Norte did not crimp the CIA's affection
for him, at least not until his relations with Washington soured under Bush
the Elder.

Now, if Bush the Younger is serious about treating drug producers as
terrorists, he must decide what to do about Afghanistan, where history
appears poised to repeat. Hitting drug-dealing enemies like the Taliban and
al Qaeda is one thing. But how is he to handle comrades-in-arms like the
Northern Alliance, which deals in the same Afghan opium?

According to UN estimates, about 70 per cent of the world's heroin begins
as Afghan opium. News reports attributed to US intelligence sources over
the past three months have said that much of that crop was grown, packaged
and shipped under the Taliban's auspices, with some claiming that bin Laden
had tried to trade huge consignments to the Russian Mafia in return for
arms, perhaps even nuclear and biological materials.

The Taliban's role is only part of the picture, however. With a hot war
winding down and the more delicate business of nation building about to
begin, the opium that Afghan peasants sowed in last year's autumn planting
season will be ready to harvest in May. "All our information is consistent
- - they're replanting poppies in a major way," says Bernard Frahi, regional
director of the UN's Geneva-based Drug Control and Crime Prevention
program, of the provinces controlled by the Alliance. "In a country that's
been bled dry, it's the easiest way to get cash quickly."

Frahi and other UN experts expect this year's Afghan crop will be the
biggest since 2000, the last year of unrestrained production before the
Taliban made a great show of uprooting poppy fields in an attempt to win
favor with the West. What the mullahs didn't do, however, was destroy a
vast stockpile of opium, perhaps as much as 4000 tonnes.

Like bin Laden, that stockpile is nowhere to be found, though it is easy to
deduce where a large part of it might have gone. According to the
Economist, a kilogram of raw opium was bringing about $US700 ($A1345) in
the drug bazaars of northern Pakistan on September 10. Two weeks later the
Taliban flooded the market to raise cash and the price dropped to just $US100.

With the fugitive Mullah Mohammed Omar believed to be holed up in Helmand
province, the traditional seat of Afghanistan's opium industry, the
mountain cultivators are likely to be too busy dodging American bombs to
bring much of that southern district's coming harvest to market.

Good news for America's drug warriors? Well, not quite. According to the
UN, the Northern Alliance has been, quite literally, digging in to meet any
shortfall. While the Taliban was last year cashing a cheque for $US43
million from the Bush administration as a token of Washington's gratitude
for Kabul's pronouncement that "opium growing is against the will of God",
the Northern Alliance was shipping out by way of Russia and neighbouring
ex-Soviet republics what the UN estimates was 200 tonnes of opium.

Even the US Drug Enforcement Administration conceded that, while the
Taliban's opium prohibition temporarily reduced supply, they were being
played for suckers. By publicly destroying crops while simultaneously
making sly sales from their stockpiles, the Taliban's drug brokers were
able to exploit a hungry market that Washington had paid them to create.

Now it is the Northern Alliance's turn. The Bush administration has been
making optimistic noises about switching the Afghan economy to more
innocent cash crops, but experts see little hope of that policy achieving
tangible results - particularly in the short term, when Washington's
primary focus will be on shepherding the country's feuding factions into
something that resembles a form of consensus democracy. That rules out the
approach being taken against cocaine in Colombia, where US Special Forces
advisers are joining local troops on search-and-destroy missions aimed at
coca plantations and processing facilities. Try that in Afghanistan, and
America can expect today's allies to be tomorrow's enemies.