Pubdate: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 Source: Times, The (UK) Copyright: 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd Contact: http://www.the-times.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/454 Author: Camilla Cavendish Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) THE WAR ON DRUGS IS NOT THE WAR ON TERROR: SAVE THE AFGHAN POPPY FIELDS What A Deadly Harvest. As British troops move in to replace Americans in some of the most volatile parts of southern Afghanistan, their valiant battle for democracy is being undermined by their own Government's confused war on opium. Yesterday the Senlis Council, an international security and development policy think-tank, cautioned that the southern states are slipping into a "state of war". Afghans, faced with overwhelming poverty caused by the West's obliteration of their poppy crops, are switching allegiance to the Taleban and other insurgents. You cannot attack poppies and insurgents at the same time. Attacks on one breed the other. By insisting on destroying the country's main source of income, the Western coalition is pursuing a counter-productive policy. True, Afghan poppies provide four fifths of the world's heroin, exporting untold misery. But it is Westerners who buy it. True, opium profits help to finance insurgents and to entrench warlords. But they also provide a basic living for more than two million Afghans. Opium is by far the most reliable and resilient crop in arid areas where almost nothing else will grow. Plans to grow roses -- almost as valuable as opium when used for perfume -- haven't got very far. Roses need water. The war in Afghanistan is not a sideshow. It is of fundamental importance in striking at the root of Islamist terror. British forces are there to destroy the Taleban strongholds, to obliterate the training camps of al-Qaeda. The last thing that British forces need is a wrong-headed drugs policy that should, frankly, be left until later. With the people increasingly disillusioned with both their Government and with foreign aid, with peace and prosperity elusive, stamping out this source of money is madness. Farmers earn a pittance for wheat, the principal alternative crop, and even less since the West started dumping wheat on their market. In Colombia, the destruction of coca and opium plantations with chemical sprays has left almost three million people near-destitute, with a virulent loathing of the American Government that insisted on the destruction as the price of its aid. And it hasn't even worked: the price of cocaine is still falling, the market awash with it. In Afghanistan, eradication is being carried out mostly by local police who cannot believe their luck at being handed a perfect opportunity for bribery. Around Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province where a quarter of the country's opium is grown, rows of tall poppies apparently wave in the breeze next to empty fields -- the ones owned by farmers too poor to afford the protection money of 3,000 to 4,000 rupees per jerib (field). Poverty was desperate under the Taleban. But the poorest farmers are incensed that their crops are being obliterated to enrich others. When the Taleban plant mines and destroy the vehicles used for eradication, farmers feel that they are the only ones on their side. Coalition forces reported that last month 420 Taleban fighters were killed in southern Afghanistan. They keep coming, in numbers that have clearly surprised the allies. To make matters worse, hundreds of Helmand farmers are still claiming that they have not been paid for voluntarily destroying their crops in 2002. The British Government says that it handed over UKP 21 million in compensation payments to the transitional authority. But farmers are still furiously brandishing IOUs of UKP 350 per field that were never paid. They make no distinction between the different authorities: they just blame the West. "We trusted the foreigners, and they cheated us," is a typical comment from those interviewed in the Senlis report. No matter what the truth is, British involvement in such a counterproductive and poorly executed strategy could hardly have been better designed to sabotage the mission of our troops. There is, thankfully, another way. This would be to channel Afghanistan's opium into legitimate use as the basis for painkillers such as morphine and codeine. The global shortage of these is a scandal. The richest six countries consume about 80 per cent and many patients in poor countries simply go without. Estimates suggest that the shortage is about 10,000 tonnes of opium a year. Afghanistan produces about 4,400 tonnes. Now there's a simple demand-supply equation. Instead of trying to dictate Afghanistan's economic policy, why not, in this era of trade liberalisation, turn illegal opium into Fairtrade Opium? At one stroke, a policy of legitimate medicinal export could reduce the amount of opium cash flowing into the pockets of insurgents, and reintegrate farmers into a legal economic system, without rendering them destitute. The illegal trade would not disappear entirely, but under the policy of the past four years, for which British and American taxpayers have been shelling out about $500 million a year, there have been bumper harvests and the trade has actually grown. As with so many good ideas hotly resisted, there is a precedent. Turkey has had a licence to grow opium for medicinal purposes since 1974. This was agreed after President Nixon had tried strenuously to convince the Turks to destroy the crops. He failed: the Turkish Government said that such a policy would simply be too destabilising. Around 600,000 Turkish farmers now happily earn their living from controlled poppy cultivation. In Afghanistan, proposals for pilot schemes along these lines are meeting a stonewall from the allies. Someone somewhere seems to believe that the "war on drugs" is equivalent to the "War on Terror". It is not. The two are linked, but not inextricably. Let us not fail our troops by pursuing a fashionable war at the expense of a vital one. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman