Posted on: Thursday, December 9, 2004

EDITORIAL
Afghanistan needs international support

The inauguration of Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan's first popularly elected president ought to be a stabilizing force for the war-ravaged central Asian land.

Voters clearly are looking to Karzai to bring peace and prosperity to the first battlefield in the U.S. war against terrorism. But as long as warlords and the opium trade flourish, Afghanistan is likely to remain mired in poverty and violence.

Now more than ever, Afghanistan needs international support.

While U.S. troops hunt down terrorists and remnants of the Taliban along the borders, the warlords run the countryside, where most Afghans reside.

Farmers have been offered few if any incentives to grow crops other than opium, whose drug trafficking profits warlords use to finance their own interests. For all its evils, the previous Taliban regime did manage to stop the cultivation of opium poppies in all but the corner of Afghanistan controlled by the Northern Alliance. But clearly their tactics, such as cutting off offenders' hands, simply could not be condoned.

Today, Afghanistan is the world's leading supplier of opium. And the international community must help the country find viable alternatives to the opium trade.

For its part, the U.S. has announced a $780-million "Plan Afghanistan" program that will include a public-affairs campaign designed to discourage poppy cultivation and promote alternative crops.

These goals must be aggressively pursued. Regional warlords won't easily surrender their turf or their illicit profits. Karzai has a daunting task before him. He needs to live up to his promises of reform, and he needs our help.