President Hamid Karzai may be doing well as the ruler in Kabul, but the Afghan drug lords seem to be doing even better in the countryside. The latest figures put out by the US State Department as well as the UN International Narcotic Control Board concur that Afghanistan has had a booming opium crop in 2004.The US State Department report says that the land area under this "cash" crop has trebled. But even going by the more conservative figure put out by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), it has gone up 64 percent to 131,000 hectares.

But despite the assessment differences, both agencies agree that Afghanistan could be teetering on the brink of turning into a narco state. With a production level of about 5,000 tonnes of opium, Afghanistan not only topped the list of countries producing the contraband, its production stood at seventeen times higher than Myanmar's, which occupied the second slot. The two countries now account for 90 percent of the world production in opium.

Fears have been expressed that the ten drug lords, who control most of the opium production in the country, might join together to form a cartel on the lines of the Colombian drug mafia. That should be a matter of serious concern not only for Afghanistan, but for all countries of the south and central Asian region.

However, it is good to remember that for all the dramatic nature of the reports from Washington, the problem did not begin yesterday. Opium production in Afghanistan went up sharply during the eighties when the Islamic resistance was in control and who used part of the drug money for purchasing weapons. At that time, the problem was benignly looked at by most western countries that saw it as part of the campaign to fight the Soviet occupation.

In recent years, the United States and its allies have depended on the same Afghan drug lords for ground support and intelligence in their war against terror. They might find it difficult now to turn around and go hammer and tongs after them-especially when the war against terror is still far from over.

But that is only one aspect of the problem, which is a far more complex one. It is estimated that nearly 10 percent of the Afghan population of 23 million are connected with opium production. It has almost become a cottage industry.

Even as President Hamid Karzai has set up a separate ministry to handle the narco problem and called for a "holy war" against the menace, it cannot afford to totally antagonize the powerful drug lords in a country where the writ of the central government runs only up to a point.

Nor can the Karzai government ignore the plight of the poor in the countryside who have come to depend on opium production as a means of livelihood. These are the people who have very few other options of income or employment.

Opium production accounts for over 40 percent of the country's GDP. A radical solution could create problems for the whole economy. International NGOs like Oxfam and CARE too have cautioned that pushing too hard against opium producers could lead to instability in the country.

It is now suggested that the government should run programmes providing alternative sources of employment to the rural poor to wean them away from opium cultivation. The United States has pledged 780 million dollars to Afghanistan's war against drugs. Britain has promised to double its commitment to $100 million.

However, all that money would be small change when compared to the kind of cash involved in Afghanistan's drug trade. Even though the poor are provided with alternative sources of livelihood, it is unlikely that they would be sufficient for the drug trade to disappear. For the profits from even a small patch of land under opium are many times more than the yield from an agricultural crop. Profit from opium is twelve times as much as wheat, for instance.

 The drug lords have been increasing their hold over refining and trafficking, and are now fairly entrenched. "Ten years ago, 20 percent of the cultivation was turned into heroin inside the country and 80 percent outside. Now 80 per cent is refined inside," says Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drug and Crime in Vienna.

 Moreover, there is the problem about the rich and influential drug lords. They are unlikely to be impressed by government schemes. One way may be to entice them by giving them a stake in the country's reconstruction programme. In the circumstances, the short answer to the drug problem in Afghanistan is that it is going to be a long haul.