ON SEPTEMBER 18 general elections in Afghanistan will mark the formal completion of that tattered country’s transition to democracy. Stability is another matter. The turbulent foreground to these elections looks daunting, but the courage of the Afghans, their refusal to be intimidated, will defeat the Taleban campaign to derail the vote, as they did in last year’s presidential elections. Their determination is shared by the West, which has deployed thousands of troops to protect candidates and election monitors.

More worrying still is the background, the field on which every Afghan battle for the future is fought. I mean field quite literally, or, rather, field upon field, stretching as far as the eye can see. Covering more than 100,000 hectares, Afghanistan’s pungent, deadly, opium poppies dominate and distort every aspect of its economy, its politics and even its culture.

The drugs industry enriches warlords and pays their militias; holds poor farmers in thrall to opium-denominated debt; lubricates corruption and terrorism and illegally provides more than half the country’s income. These poppies account for 80 per cent of illegal heroin consumption worldwide, making misery Afghanistan’s only significant export. But for 350,000 very poor farming families, the poppy is also their only lifeline.

A report last week by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) observes that unless the poppy can be taken out of the equation in Afghanistan, “democracy may never come of age”. Governments agree, and are pouring money into counter-narcotics programmes: $490 million this year alone, mostly from the US and the UK, and a further $1.3 billion pledged (not delivered) by the EU. Big money, up against bigger money. The industry is worth $2 billion to the Afghans and billions more along the supply chain to British dealers.

Kabul is trying hard, through presidential persuasion, improved law enforcement and civil as well as religious fatwas against drugs. The UNODC, which expects the area under cultivation to have declined this year by a fifth — from a record high in 2004 — bravely claims that the tide is turning, with “a kind of mass psychology, an aversion to opium cultivation, in the countryside”. Perhaps. But this could equally well be a temporary “market correction ” to an opium glut, which “success” in cutting cultivation will reverse. Because of perfect poppy weather this year, yields have soared anyway, leaving Afghanistan’s share of production unchanged, at 87 per cent.

Experience elsewhere shows that farmers, who typically see no more than 4 per cent of opium revenues, would rather grow legal crops if they have the choice. But diversifying out of opium will take decades. You need to introduce not only other crops, but a new marketing infrastructure — and to have the power to destroy the barons who rule the drugs roost, power that the Afghan Government is unlikely to wield so long as opium is the robber king. The task has broken stronger governments.

Unless we can lay hands on a tool that can cut this Gordian knot — now, not a decade or so from now — Afghanistan could relapse hideously into armed anarchy.

Now consider this. The opium that the world is spending billions to destroy in Afghanistan is the basis of painkilling medicines, such as codeine and morphine, that are in desperately short supply throughout the developing world. Six rich countries consume 80 per cent of the available morphine, and developing countries only 6 per cent; the drug is either beyond their means or not available at all.

To bring supplies of opium-derived painkillers up to adequate levels at affordable prices, the pharmaceutical industry would need an annual 10,000 tonnes of opium produced under licence. Afghanistan illegally produces 4,100 tonnes. If, instead of burning the stuff, the world were to buy it in controlled conditions for medical purposes, millions of Aids and cancer patients who now die in agony could benefit from a drug whose mercies were known in ancient Mesopotamia. Afghan farmers would earn their money legally; tax revenues would improve; drugs warlords would be bypassed and the fall-off in the drugs trade would help to stabilise Central Asia. Afghanistan’s entire crop, at today’s prices, would cost about $650 million a year — less than the world proposes to spend on eradication.

The counter-drugs establishment is appalled. It would “send the wrong message”, just when Afghans are getting hold of the idea that growing opium is wrong. The place is far too corrupt for legal cultivation to be made secure. India, one of the countries licensed to grow opium by the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, checks every stage in the process and has vastly more effective law enforcement, yet there is a thriving black market. Some Afghan ministers agree, and are scared stiff; but others, in Afghanistan and outside, see legal production as a “win-win” strategy.

The Senlis Council, a French drugs think-tank that will present an extensive feasibility study to a conference in Kabul on September 28, acknowledges the difficulties and says that the long-term aim should be to end Afghan opium production. It describes its proposals for licensed opium as no more than a “transitional” solution complementing rural development, and insists that its strategy would be carefully tested in pilot schemes.

Such caution may be good tactics — not least in winning over the US, whose pharmaceuticals industry could not touch the stuff without Congress’s approval. The fact remains that opium is one of the few “banker” crops in the arid Afghan uplands. If it were possible to divert this dangerous industry into legal channels, the gains would be immense — for Afghans and for the poor who now suffer needless pain. Further ahead, Afghanistan could indeed switch crops: to genetically modified poppies, which, Australian research has discovered, could combat malaria and cancer but would be no use to drug addicts. A losing war could be turned into a winning experiment.

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