What,” asked Susan Collins over dinner in Bangor 15 months ago, “about drugs?”

We were talking Afghanistan. The senator had been there early in 2002. So had I – and in 2001 and most years for the past three decades. Collins had legislative power; I had local knowledge. Her apt question deserved my best answer.

Collins’ question was apt because Afghanistan produces 80 percent of the world’s opium. Almost all is exported. Most is refined into heroin, either while still in Afghanistan or en route to markets elsewhere. A primary market, despite our decades-long War on Drugs, is the United States.

So my best answer – best for October 2002 – may have seemed wrong-headed, even irresponsible. “Forget drugs,” I said. “They’re not our priority in Afghanistan.”

The Pentagon still mostly agrees. Its mission, begun in October 2001, remains the elimination of terrorism, not narcotics. And, awkwardly, some of America’s Afghan allies in Operation Enduring Freedom are not only warlords but drug lords. Target their narcotics activities, so Pentagon thinking has gone, and they’ll stop helping us against the Forces of Evil, currently defined in Afghanistan as the triumvirate of al-Qaida, extremist Taliban, and vicious renegade Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. “Given the mission we have right now, which is to kill and capture terrorists and improve security, our ability to be actively involved is limited,” said General David Barno, our top soldier in Kabul, only last month.

Barno’s not wrong, and neither was I in 2002. But the link between security and narcotics has gotten more complicated over the past 15 months. Drug production and trafficking have run amok. The cash flow now fuels enemy Islamists as well as warlord allies. And the rule of law, already weak but on which security must someday depend, is further undermined everywhere.

Talk with Ashraf Ghani, the restless, brilliant, abrasive Minister of Finance. His nagging take: That Afghanistan risks becoming a narco-state. “Risks?” hrrumphed an Old Afghan Hand recently, “It’s already worse than Columbia. Drugs are preventing Afghanistan from becoming a state at all.”

It wasn’t always that way. Pre-conflict Afghanistan grew lots of hashish and some opium, but drugs amounted to only a small fraction of GDP. Now the percentage exceeds 50 percent. Domestic consumption used to be concentrated among back-sore carpet weavers and mind-blown hippies. Now returning Afghan refugees have imported addictions begun in Pakistan and Iran. Once Muslim prohibitions on cultivating narcotics were widely observed and seldom questioned. Now, as production spreads and profits mount, ways are found to rationalize scripture.

These are recent developments. Holy war against the Soviets limited production until 1990. In the political vacuum that followed, however, opium soared. The all-time record harvest occurred under Taliban rule in 1999.

Then, in the watershed year of 2001, Mullah Omar declared the business illicit and backed his edict with threats of amputation and execution. Corporal and capital punishment, ineffective in the West, does deter crime in Afghanistan. Opium poppy cultivation dropped by 90 percent.

The Taliban ban had less than noble reasons. It was imposed, in part, to centralize control of production. In part to raise market price. In part to please the West. There’s evidence that the Taliban planned to reverse policy – and thus to cash in later on. Even so, critics ask, why can’t Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai now replicate what the Forces of Evil once accomplished?

The sad and simple answer is that Karzai possesses neither carrot nor stick. The carrot in narcotics control is “alternative livelihood,” beloved of ivory tower development theorists but years away for Afghanistan. Alternative livelihood requires not simply substitute crops but a broad re-direction of rural economy towards more nonagricultural pursuits. At the moment Karzai cannot himself even travel into rural areas.

Which brings us to stick. Taliban sticks were big and brutal; Karzai has next to none. His Afghan National Army, a much ballyhooed Bush brain-child, languishes in defection-ridden infancy. His police, despite excellent training by dedicated ex-pats of my acquaintance, remain mired in poor pay and chronic corruption. And the warlords, while professing loyalty to Kabul, go their own way, wave their own sticks, and plant their own poppies.

So, what progress thus far on countering drugs in the new Afghanistan? An early 2002 “compensation” program backfired. The British government, which has “lead” status among other nations in helping Afghans with their counter-narcotics effort, paid certain poppy growers to stop. Results were, as one Brit puts it with characteristic understatement, “less positive than hoped.” Poppy growers stopped for a bit, then threatened to start growing again unless payment continued. Non-poppy growers, by-passed by “compensation,” announced their plans to start planting.

Compensation was halted. New offices are opened. More conferences are held. President Karzai – who is not to be blamed in this matter thus far – issues more proclamations. The British talk about structural reform in the Counter Narcotics Directorate which they support. And opium poppy cultivation rose by more than 900 percent in the first year of the post-Taliban era.

That increase continued in 2003. Opium poppies were grown in a record 28 of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces. Average family income for poppy growers was $3,900, at least three times the national average. Total farm gate income totaled $1.02 billion. And the estimated annual turn-over of international trade in Afghan opiates was $30 billion. That traffic involves (another estimation by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime) half a million persons.

Some of our new buddies are among them. Last summer I sat on the outskirts of a chat in Jalalabad, capital of Ningarhar province where we continue to struggle against Islamist terrorists. The two principle conversationalists were Jalalabad’s chief warlord and UNODC’s chief executive. The warlord waxed pious and earnest in his condemnation of narcotics. The drug czar, sincere but seldom in country and reliant on others for information, praised his warlord host as “a man of vision.”

The vision thing. Six weeks later a convoy of dark-windowed Toyota Land Cruisers from Jalalabad was spotted heading towards Kabul. The spotter happened to be a top Afghan counter narcotics official. He knew what the convoy was carrying. He knew it came from Jalalabad’s warlord. He watched in impotent fury as it turned, just before a Kabul police checkpoint, and headed north towards the Afghan border with Tajikistan. That road north runs directly in front of the main U.S. base at Bagram. The Bagram area warlord is palsy-walsy with his Jalalabad counterpart. And we depend on both in the War on Terror.

That war in Afghanistan – unlike the fraud perpetrated by Bush in Iraq – was worth beginning and remains worth winning. But our whole Afghan enterprise is now threatened by a contrary development more pervasive and deeply destructive than terrorism. What good is winning when the prize, meanwhile, has become a narco-state?

Both President Karzai and his Western supporters face hard choices here. One risky option: massive eradication in which Afghan government personnel destroy the poppies under ex-pat force protection. Risky but maybe worth the risk. The alternative – doing nothing – will lead to narco-statehood, likely power vacuum, and then a revival of the militant extremism that we’ve worked so hard to end.

Sen. Collins’ question now deserves more than my shrug. She and her government colleagues should give it their fullest attention.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.