Western efforts to suppress the Afghan opium trade, the source of most of Europe's heroin supplies, have been a failure so far.
Production fell during the Taliban's rule but has risen sharply since 2001. Efforts to encourage replacement crops have made scant progress. And US commanders, concentrating on their `war on terror,' have not made the problem a priority.
Michael Ancram, the UK Conservative opposition's defense spokesman, said the other week that 60 percent of the Afghan economy was drug-based.
"There will never be stability until that changes," he said.
The worry for NATO troops deploying to Helmand and Kandahar in the south, the heartland of the opium business that straddles key transportation routes linking Pakistan and Iran, is that serious attempts at eradication will inevitably fuel the escalating conflict.
A series of recent investigations by US media, notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, has also established that Bush administration reconstruction programs in Afghanistan, like their equivalents in Iraq, have been plagued by delays, extraordinary cost over-runs, incompetence and alleged corruption.
Of 1,000 US-funded buildings due for completion by the end of last year, only 138 had been turned over to the Afghan government by the beginning of this month.
But security -- or the lack of it -- continues to override all other concerns while simultaneously hampering Afghanistan's political and economic progress.
With Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, threatening intensifying jihad against "all infidel forces," worries are growing in Britain and allied countries about the situation their troops will face next spring, especially in the south, as the US begins to pull back.
The basic question, as yet unanswered, is what are peacekeepers supposed to do when there is no peace to keep?
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