Canada, Afghanistan, and the poppy explosion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Much of our attention has justifiably been focused on Iraq, and on the surge, or troop escalation, and on the upcoming report from General Petraeus, written by the White House, and on the debate between those who see Iraq for what it is, a failure, and those who want more war, that is, more failure.

But what of the real front in the so-called war on terror, the first front, before the sidetrack of Iraq, that is, what of Afghanistan?

Canadians are dying there -- the death toll is rising and we are a country in mourning. We may not stay beyond February 2009, the current deployment, and it is, needless to say, a tense political issue here. The Bloc Québécois, a Quebec-based separatist party that has the third most seats in the House of Commons, wants to bring down the Conservative government, a minority in terms of seats, over the war, but the Liberals, the official opposition, refuse to oblige -- over climate change, perhaps, but not Afghanistan, not now, maybe later.

And so the debate rages on.

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Meanwhile, while Afghanistan may be more of a success -- or, rather, less of a failure -- than Iraq, at least one front of the war there has proven to be a failure, and a serious one at that:

Afghan opium poppy cultivation exploded to a record high this year, with the multibillion-dollar trade fuelled by the Taliban insurgency and corrupt officials in President Hamid Karzai's government, a UN report said Monday.

Afghanistan has opium growing on 193,000 hectares of land, a 17 per cent increase from last year's then-record 165,000 hectares, according to an annual survey by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.

"The situation is dramatic and getting worse by the day," said Antonio Maria Costa, the UNODC's executive director.

The country now accounts for 93 per cent of the global production of opium, the raw material for heroin, and has doubled its output since two years ago, the report said.

"No other country in the world has ever had such a large amount of farmland used for illegal activity, beside China 100 years ago," when it was a major opium producer, Mr. Costa said in an interview in Kabul.

The so-called war on drugs is not the issue here -- that's another war that has long been lost. What this report suggests is that the Afghan government is essentially a municipal government in Kabul, that that government is corrupt, that the Taliban is still strong throughout much of the country, beyond the borders of Kabul, and that the war in Afghanistan, a NATO effort but very much an American one as well, whatever the monumental distraction of Iraq, a war that has been going on even longer than the more disastrous one in Iraq, has been, to put it mildly, euphemistically, a disappointment.

And I haven't even mentioned that Osama hasn't been found.

Unless the Afghan opium industry is brought under control, or at least some semblance of control, there will never be stability there. And without stability there will never be peace.

The war goes on, but to what end?