The poppy conundrum

Afghanistan produces around 90 percent of the world's opium, and the Taliban may have earned as much as $600 million from taxing poppy farmers and opium traffickers between 2005 and 2008. Elsewhere in the country, NATO eradicates poppy fields, and Afghan officials are keen to eliminate the vice marring the face of their country.

Zulmai Afzali, the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics, put it quite plainly:

How can we allow the world to see lawful forces in charge of Marja next to fields full of opium, which one way or another will be harvested and turned into a poison that kills people all over the world?

A February 2010 report prepared by the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime determined that after a one-third drop in opium cultivation over the past two years, the 2010 crop will remain stable.

Twenty provinces in Afghanistan are poppy-free and will remain so, with another five also potentially ending their poppy cultivation this year, the report said. The authors also found a correlation between poor security conditions and the cultivation of poppy: 80 percent of villages with very poor security conditions grew poppy, while only 7 percent of the villages unaffected by violence grew.

According to Nordland, some Afghan officials believe it's the other way around: poppy cultivation leads to insecurity.

In Marja, where villagers have suffered through a heavy coalition military offensive, NATO has made the decision that the people should be allowed to keep growing. It makes for bad PR, but even the United Nations agrees it's probably a good idea, at least for this year.

I tend to agree. I've never though that poppy eradication should be a top priority of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Burning down farmers' fields that provide a majority of the population with their only source of income is a guaranteed way not to make friends. And yet, opium is a huge source of funding for the insurgency.

It seems to me that the insurgency-opium continuum works the way the U.N. and NATO see it: Insecurity leads to poppy cultivation. If you can't offer people free schooling or government employment, what else are they supposed to do?

So it's encouraging that Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the head of the UNODC in Afghanistan, sees the same correlation, according to Nordland. Lemahieu believes that the dropping opium prices -- after years of over-production -- will make it easier for farmers to accept slightly lower profits in exchange for free schools and clinics.

Allowing Afghanistan to remain as the opium capital of the world is unacceptable, but trampling through someone's country, wreaking havoc on their society and infrastructure (what remains of it) and then burning down their livelihood is a recipe for failure.