Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains hooked on opium. The drug trade has become the country's largest employer, its biggest export and the largest source of income and credit in a land devastated by decades of war...

So pervasive is the trade that Afghanistan is at risk of becoming a lawless narco-state where drug dealers will determine who holds power. Even now it is a major source of corruption that undermines the fledgling government of President Hamid Karzai and is the chief source of funds for regional warlords and Taliban terrorists.

Without cash from opium, says U.S. Marine General James Jones, the former supreme commander of NATO, the Taliban could not afford to continue their insurgency.

"I think the Achilles heel of Afghanistan is the narcotics problems," he testified recently in Washington. "I think the uncontrolled rise of the spread of narcotics, the business that it brings in, the money that it generates, is being used to fund the insurgency, criminal elements and anything to bring chaos and disorder."

The drug trade is so pervasive in rural Afghanistan some experts insist it will be impossible to stamp it out simply through crop eradication programs.

Destroying the only cash crop impoverished farmers can rely on to feed their families will drive them into the Taliban camp, says Anatol Lieven, a researcher with the New America Foundation in Washington.

"You can't simply cut that off without reimpoverishing much of the population and, of course, risking political disaster," he says. "It's a complex problem."

Short-term, quick-fix strategies, including outright bans, forced eradication and aerial spraying, won't work, he warns. They could also provide the Taliban with a recruiting strategy...

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