If Bruce Alexander, who wrote in the previous issue of The Republic about the source of addiction in the West as neoconservative-hyped capitalism, is right, then the decision by Maxime Bernier, Canada’s Foreign Minister, to commit Canadian troops in Afghanistan to opium poppy eradication, is nothing short of perverse immorality.

The Conservative government of Stephen Harper even more than the previous regimes of Liberals Paul Martin and Jean Chretien is of like mind with the traditions of market-economy policies established by the regimes a generation earlier of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the US and Britain, Canada’s two parents. It is those policies that tore out the fabric of the welfare state established in the post-World War II world and replaced it with a hyper-competitive survival-of-the-fittest matrix wherein there are great winners but also a necessary number of losers. Not everyone is equipped to thrive in such a stark environment; moreover, the focus on competition at all levels in such an economic system requires that there are visible losers in order for the marginal to become motivated to try harder and avoid the obvious and serious costs of falling back or falling off.

It is those who are consigned either permanently or temporarily to the ranks of the losers who, suffering social ostricization, insecure, inadequate, or non-existent housing, and no hope of prospects, who become addicted to substances like heroin which provide the semblance of a community of sorts, and serve to obliterate the worst conditions of their reality.

But governments of the West have repeatedly addressed the problems caused by some of their citizens being addicted to hard-core and damaging drugs by attacking the various sources of production of the drugs rather than attacking the various sources of the demand for the drugs. The reasons are obvious. Attacking the production of the drugs usually means war and its attendant death and infrastructure damage taking place in other countries, while an attack on the demand for the drugs would mean far more difficult, way more intelligent, and home-country based changes to how we organize society and how we operate our economy.

It is admittedly a big conceptual leap to expect policy makers like Bernier to adapt to a whole new paradigm of understanding drug addiction as a phenomenon intrinsic to competitive-based, individual-oriented modern economic policy. But it isn’t as big a conceptual leap as what our warriors are asking Afghanistan’s policy makers and farm families to make. Afghanistan has farmed poppies as the backbone of its whole economy for far longer than there has been a Canada. Afghans have consumed opium since long before anyone in the West had ever heard of the stuff. And because it is a particular and modern economic system that produces addictions and not the drugs, traditional Afghan society, built around community and long engaged in both the production of opium and its consumption, has never experienced the phenomenon of addicted citizens. For our policy makers to now send into the traditional Afghan countryside heavily armed soldiers backed by high-tech weaponry from the sky in order to destroy poppy farms all because our policy makers have sustained an economy and social policy back at home that has created unrestrained demand for opium and that we are unwilling to do anything about, is immoral decision making by the government of the highest order.

The crime is further compounded by the rationale used by the foreign minister for this egregious policy: the profits realized by Afghan production of opium is said to finance the home-grown insurgency against which our foreign troops are deployed.

Here is the picture Bernier would have us believe: We have invaded and are now violently occupying a foreign country that played a significant part in attacking a NATO ally on September 11, 2001. Resistors there are funding their fight by growing opium they sell, ultimately, to heroin users in our streets who as a result are becoming increasingly addicted to it. To drain the resistance of its funding, and to help dampen down addiction in our streets, we are now going to attack the Afghan farmers who grow the opium. As an added benefit, by fighting the spectre of terrorism there, we don’t have to fight them here, where they might bomb our ships or trains.

The real picture is significantly different. Even if there is today or ever was in 2001 an organization called al Qaeda, and even if its leader is or ever was Osama bin Laden, and even if he somehow stopped being a CIA agent (which he most assuredly was prior to 2001), and even if he planned the attacks of 2001 from a base-camp in Afghanistan—none of these premises having ever been proved to even a reasonable degree—we still have the problem of concluding that the Taliban government of Afghanistan can not in any real sense be accused of being an accessory to that crime. The initial US attack on the Taliban was unlawful, and the later NATO deployment to Afghanistan, with a significant Canadian contribution, is therefore unlawful too.

Being unlawful, the Geneva Convention, to which Canada is bound by its signature on it, empowers local Afghans, and in fact any foreign fighter as well, to join in a resistance. The Taliban had by 2001 nearly eradicated poppy production for opium export both because of a moral stance against abuse of the drug and because its production was fueling the armies of the warlords the Taliban had constantly to battle with. The return of opium production in a big way to Afghanistan serves as much to re-arm and re-ignite the war lords who battle all governments of both the home-grown and foreign occupation kind as it does to fuel the Taliban-organized resistance to the illegal foreign occupation of their own country.

Opium production offers such lucrative returns not because Afghan farmers are so good at it but because the streets of Western cities, including our own, are teeming with the dissociated and alienated victims of our new hyper-competitive, individual-based economies who require heroin to serve the resulting addictions caused by Western governments’ disinvestment in community-sustaining infrastructure.

The injustice of it is not lost on citizens of Afghanistan who see two things: large efforts by Western governments, including Canada, to reform Afghan society at the point of a gun, and no efforts to reform our own societies where the problems with heroin originate; and the destruction of war is being brought to their cities by Western governments so that no damage of war might spread to our own untouched cities, even though it has been Afghan cities that have been pummeled by war already for decades, while cities of the West, notwithstanding New York on 9/11, remain wholly and forever untouched by war and face no real threat of it.

The irony of our immoral policies go deeper. The broad and powerful forces of globalization to which our government has been committed no matter the party in power threatens to reform societies such as Afghanistan’s in ways that will bring to them the same sort of social dissociation and alienation that are intrinsic features of our own societies, and will lead inevitably to high rates of addiction to substances like heroin in their streets. It was farsighted and insightful resistance to globalization that first put the Taliban government at odds with the governments of the West. It was their attempt at maintaining cultural self-determination through rejection of Western-dictated economic and social reforms that got Afghanistan in trouble. Our governments will call our war on Afghanistan a victory only when the Afghan economy is thoroughly indebted to the insidious World Bank, and only when culturally-relevant and historically-based social structures in Afghanistan are thoroughly eradicated in favour of a Western-style hyper-competitive, individual-based, and increasingly addicted, society, such as our own.

Our government cannot be supported in its Afghan venture by anyone with even the slightest allegiance to morality. It’s hard to say what policy we can support, given what has by now happened and the tragedies that would unfold if we simply left altogether. But whatever a new policy toward Afghanistan might look like, it must be re-framed with new premises, chief amongst them being that resistance to the pernicious forces of Western-constructed globalization is wholly legitimate, that the problems associated with substances like heroin arise completely with demand and have nothing to do with supply and so are our problem to solve, not theirs, and that the justifications for the initial attack on Afghanistan, as well as the continuing occupation, were and remain entirely false and completely illegal.

So what should the policy be? Maybe just a statement at this point. Maybe telling a bit of truth for a change might open up new possibilities not presently available.