When archive material showing Osama bin Laden hiding in an underground fortress is aired on Western news bulletins, the perception that Afghanistan is a lawless periphery is reinforced. Still, European parents concerned about their children having access to lethal drugs may have good reason to fear that crops cultivated in Afghanistan can end up too close to home for their comfort. About 90 per cent of the heroin sold in Western Europe derives from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, then, the fight against drugs has been one of the main preoccupations of the officials tasked with drafting the EU’s aid plans for the country over the past few years. Chris Patten, former EU commissioner for external relations, has written about the frustration he experienced after his 2003 pledge to spend $1.3 billion over a five-year period in Afghanistan. In his book Not Quite The Diplomat, Patten notes that the income of Afghan warlords exceeded the development aid that the internal community spent to help the country reconstruct itself in the post-Taliban period.

A recent report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says that the 2007 opium harvest may not be lower than the bumper one of 165,000 hectares in 2006. Last year’s harvest was a 59 per cent rise over the previous season. The EU has made a commitment to provide $810 million of development aid to Afghanistan in 2007-10.

In its country strategy paper for Afghanistan, the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, describes the drugs trade as the “primary threat to stable political development,” and says there is a risk that the state institutions could be held captive by drug traders. Although EU officials say they are exploring how to help poor farmers in Afghanistan find a different source of income to the opium poppy trade, they insist that no system for promoting alternatives can take root without a functioning rule of law. For that reason, the officials say, the EU is funding both rural development and law enforcement schemes. The European Commission and the UK are the principal donors to an international trust fund to support counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan.

Some NGOs query, however, whether the EU is right to be financing the eradication of opium poppies. The Kabul authorities have given responsibility for eradication to regional governors, who rely on international finance. “The EU should stay out of the eradication process,” said Tom Kramer from the Transnational Institute in The Netherlands, which monitors international policies on drugs. “Eradication threatens the livelihoods of opium farmers and should not take place unless they have other sources of income. Where eradication has taken place, it has affected the poorest farmers. There has been no eradication where the target has been farmers with a better access to livelihoods.”

With the World Bank calculating that 3.5 million Afghans can be considered extremely poor and another 10.5 million vulnerable to extreme poverty, nobody doubts that Afghanistan needs substantial assistance. Yet because of the central role it has in the war against terror, anti-poverty campaigners are troubled that agenda for raising aid to Afghanistan may be driven more by narrow political considerations than concern for its poor. — IPS