Our heroes are fighting heroin and they can't win.

Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has said that "opium cultivation is more dangerous than factional fighting, more dangerous than terrorism." American Gen. James L. Jones, NATO's operational commander in Afghanistan, was even more emphatic last December: "For my money, the No. 1 problem in Afghanistan is drugs." And Canada's top general, Rick Hillier, is under no illusions: He calls opium poppies "a weapon of mass destruction."

So it's a little odd that now, when Canadians have finally started talking about this country's mission in Afghanistan and what we hope to accomplish, opium is being treated as a minor side issue. It's not. Afghanistan's fate hinges on it. And that means Canada's mission in Afghanistan -- and the safety of our soldiers -- does too.

Something like 60 per cent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product comes from the country's poppy fields. It's the country's only real industry. And in a strange way, it's a success. More than 80 per cent of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan, an export record the country would embrace and build on if it involved watermelons or carpets or anything legal.

But the poppy-and-heroin trade is not legal, of course. The whole thing is one vast black market. And like black markets everywhere, the business is saturated with bribery and bloodshed. Plata o plomo, as they say in Latin America: Silver or lead.

This would be poisonous in any country. But to a nation unimaginably poor -- a nation tortured by 25 years of war, a nation criss-crossed by tribal fault lines, a nation on the front line of a global clash -- it is death.

Regional warlords siphon money from the drug trade to buy guns, men and power. So do the Taliban. And the terrorists. Throughout the country, drug money feeds the chaos and hobbles the central government: Even with the backing of thousands of powerfully equipped foreign soldiers, Mr. Karzai is really not much more than the mayor of Kabul.

Afghanistan has always been a poor, fractious, tumultuous country -- never the "relatively advanced country" that Gen. Hillier claimed, in an interview last week, existed prior to the Soviet invasion. In 1970, at the height of Afghanistan's longest period of stability, life expectancy was 39.7 years. Among children aged one year or younger, one in five died. Among children aged five or younger, one in three died.

To bring a modest level of stability and economic development to a country that has barely known either is a mammoth job. It's not certain that it can be done. But to do it when the economy is dominated by a single illicit industry is absolutely impossible.
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So what can be done about Afghanistan's poppy fields?

The United States has pushed its favourite method -- eradication. Little has been done, though, because Mr. Karzai has resisted it. And for good reason.

The central government is simply too weak to carry out systematic eradication on the ground. Bribes are paid. Threats are made. Favours are asked. And the poppies are spared -- all except those of the poorest and weakest farmers, of course.

Aerial spraying -- the method of choice in South America -- is possible but it would simply displace the fields from one place to another and launch the same destructive game of whack-a-mole that has been going on in the Andes since the late 1980s. It would also turn farmers against the government and its foreign soldiers -- which is why eradication is probably the best hope the Taliban have of ever returning to power.

The alternative to the stick is the carrot -- programs that encourage farmers to switch to legal crops. No one suffers, everyone benefits. Not surprisingly, this is very popular.

And very ineffective. Programs like this have been used in countries around the world and they routinely fail because drug crops are so lucrative and easy to grow that no legal crop can compete. This would be particularly true in Afghanistan, where war has destroyed most irrigation systems, and the irrigation systems can't be rebuilt until order is restored -- which can't happen until the poppy market is curtailed.

To deal with this dilemma, Robert Rotberg of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government has proposed that Western governments simply offer to buy wheat from Afghan farmers at three times the world price. He calculates that this would make wheat as attractive to farmers as opium is now and it would actually cost less than the $3 billion U.S. the United States is spending in its futile attempts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppies.

A European think-tank, the Senlis Council, has also proposed that Afghanistan be given international permission to grow opium to be sold in the legal morphine market.

The problem with both of these ideas is that black markets -- like all markets -- are self-correcting. If a big chunk of Afghanistan's production were removed from the market, the price would rise. And that would change the math, tipping farmers back toward growing opium. It would likely also attract new growers, thus shifting production from one province to another -- once again turning Afghanistan into a giant game of whack-a-mole.

And the game likely wouldn't stay within Afghanistan's borders: Pakistan has a long history of opium-growing and displacement in Afghanistan would almost certainly spill over into the only nuclear-armed Muslim country.
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It seems this is a riddle with no solution. But consider a little history.

When Gen. Hillier called the opium poppy "a weapon of mass destruction," he was only partly right. That's true today. But for thousands of years, opium poppies were grown and traded in central Asia for use as a medicine and a recreational drug. And in all that time they were not a source of corruption, violence and war.

(But what about the disintegration of China in the 19th century as the result of mass opium addiction, you ask? And what about the Opium Wars? The former is a myth, well illustrated in Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, by Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun. The latter was the result of British attempts to open the Chinese market by force, with the opium trade merely incidental to the larger story of European commercial imperialism.)

It was prohibition that turned a plant into a weapon of mass destruction. It was prohibition that turned opium into a nation-killer.

I'm sure many policy-makers know this. And judging by the conversations I've had, most of the experts realize the obvious corollary: Eliminate prohibition and opium will stop being a nation-killer.

But still, alternatives to prohibition are never seriously discussed at high levels. There are too many powerful people in the United States for whom prohibition is a religion and too many officials at the United Nations whose lucrative jobs depend on the status quo. In international policy circles, every ambitious person knows this is one box they must never think outside of.

This is why I am increasingly pessimistic about Canada's mission in Afghanistan. I just don't see how it can succeed.

Everyone from Mr. Karzai to Gen. Hillier agrees that there will be no success in Afghanistan without a solution to the opium problem. But there is no solution, at least not as long as we refuse to look at the root of the problem.

And so it doesn't matter how skilled our soldiers are. It doesn't matter how dedicated they are, how determined to save that tragic land.

They are fighting and dying in the War on Drugs. And that is a war no one can ever win.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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