Brian Rudman: Deadly scourge no-one is fighting

This month, Prime Minister John Key made a bare-chested declaration of war against the drug lords.

Custom officers would be redeployed. Cold sufferers would have to surrender their decongestants for the great crusade against P.

Yet at the same time he's dispatching a new wave of New Zealand troops to try to prop up the narco-state of Afghanistan, where one in seven people is involved in peddling opium-based drugs to the world.

In a report issued last week by the United National Office on Drugs and Crime (www.unodc.org), executive director Antonio Maria Costa says the intermediaries in the trade are not just "shady characters linked to international mafias, they are also white-collar Afghan officials who take a cut by protecting the drug trade as well as the religious fanatics and political insurgents who do the same to finance their cause".

The world opiate trade - 92 per cent of which originates in the poppy fields of Afghanistan - is worth $91 billion a year, or about half New Zealand's annual gross domestic product.

The trade is worth more than the GDP of 120 countries, yet only 4 per cent of the crop is eradicated at source, and less than 2 per cent of drugs are seized by law enforcement agents locally.

Mr Costa says: "The lines between the ideologically driven Taleban, the criminal groups in the business for profit, and the government officials taking a cut for greed, have become blurry ... The Afghan drug economy generates several hundred million dollars per year into evil hands - some with black turbans, others with white collars.

"The Afghan opium trade is a well-funded threat to the health of nations."

This is all happening under the eyes of the grand United States-led coalition of troops against terror. Defence Minister Wayne Mapp returned from the battle zone this weekend declaring the strategy in Afghanistan was "on the right track".

Yet reading this report, you can't help concluding that instead of risking the lives of our SAS troops in winning hearts and minds, we'd be doing a better job for humanity by dispatching a fleet of top-dressing planes loaded up with a potent herbicide.

There's something truly Alice in Wonderland about a coalition of modern democracies hunting through the wilds of central Asia for a mythical beast called terror which it can't find, while leaking across the borders between the soldiers' legs is an evil doing more harm than all the terror plots dreamed up by mad mullahs in 100 years.

Mr Costa says that 100,000 people a year die from Afghan opium products.

The 10,000 a year who die from heroin overdoses in Nato countries is five times higher than the total number of Nato troops killed in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001.

It's estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 Russians die from drug overdoses a year. Neighbouring Iran has one of the world's most serious opiate addiction problems, with about one million users.

Afghanistan opium is not only causing a huge health problem worldwide, it's also funding crime and terror - the very enemies the coalition troops are trying to defeat. The report says the opiate cash "fills the coffers of international organised crime groups and finances insurgent and extremist groups active in conflict zones throughout the world.

"Nowhere is this synergy more evident than in Afghanistan where insurgents and drug traffickers have joined forces and presently control parts of the southern drug corridors into Iran and Pakistan," Mr Costa says. "The Afghanistan/Pakistan border region has turned into the world's largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit - drugs of course, but also weapons, bomb-making equipment, chemical precursors, drug money, even people."

Afghanistan is listed by the World Bank as being in the top 2 per cent of corrupt countries, so it is pointless to expect its government to arrest this trade.

The report notes that a "segment of [Afghan] state apparatus have effectively been 'captured' by a specific client group, organised crime. In this sense it is not only a failure of state institutions but also a means of enrichment and empowerment of political elites.

"Most interactions with government services in Afghanistan generally involves some form of bribery."

The vote-rigging by President Karzai's supporters in the recent first round of the presidential elections is evidence enough of that. That even one New Zealand soldier's life is being put at risk to prop up this failed regime is bad enough. But to be part of a coalition that has turned a blind eye to an evil trade that has burgeoned since the Western troops arrived is worse.

Only last week, John Key declared: "The drug P is a dangerously destructive substance that has taken hold in New Zealand. It is wrecking lives, wrecking families, fuelling crime and allowing gangs to flourish. I'm determined to confront this scourge."

Who would argue with this declaration of war? Yet on a world scale, the opiate trade is killing around 100,000 a year. It is triggering the spread of HIV at an unprecedented rate, funding criminal groups, insurgents and terrorists worldwide.

And what do we do? We send our troops to the poppy fields of Afghanistan and tell them to look behind the petals for religious fanatics instead. Where's the Agent Orange herbicide when you need it?