Poppie power

Jim Hoagland:

The power to destroy does not carry within it the power to control. A century of failed colonial rule and the American misadventure in Vietnam etched that lesson on global consciousness for a time. It has taken the huge problems that affluent, nuclear-armed nations are encountering in the miserable ruins of Afghanistan and Iraq to drive it home anew.

Call it the paradox of overwhelming but insufficient force. It is surfacing in a struggle in Afghanistan over the wisdom of chemically eradicating that nation's expanding poppy fields. They are the source of (1) the livelihoods of many Afghan peasants, (2) a record flood of heroin into Western markets and (3) funding for the Taliban and other terrorist forces.

William Wood, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, has pushed so aggressively for aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields that he has been nicknamed "Chemical Bill" by NATO officers serving there. President Bush posted Wood to Afghanistan after he oversaw a large eradication-by-air project in Colombia, with mixed results.

Wood's priorities have divided U.S. and Afghan policymakers. President Hamid Karzai's government fears both environmental damage and the radicalizing political effect that a spraying program might have on the peasants Karzai is trying to coax away from the Taliban. For the moment, Karzai has gained the upper hand over the State Department's narcotics bureau in this ongoing fight.

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The West will begin to resolve the grim and massive problems that the international drug trade creates only when the United States and Europe make justice rather than vengeance the center of drug laws, create effective rehabilitation programs that fill hospitals rather than jails and curb the demand for life- and soul-destroying narcotics at home. Even a "successful" poppy eradication program in Afghanistan would be no more than a bandage on a gaping wound, while inflicting great damage on Karzai's government.

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Hoagland might as well throw in solving poverty and world hunger in his strategy for defeating the poppie trade. The fact is that the poppies have the power to destroy both the people who use the product and those who produce them.

A carrot and stick approach might be more productive. Destroy the plants in those areas outside the government control and work with those in government control to develop new products. This would have the effect of demonstrating the Taliban's weakness as well as the benefits of working with the government. The current practice of allowing the Taliban to finance their evil ways while having our addicts pay for it seems the worst of all worlds.