THE parliamentary debate on Australia's involvement in Afghanistan has involved little mention of its implications for our other big conflict, the war on drugs. In Afghanistan, the US and its allies are, once again, propping up Third World drug producers for political purposes.

According to the UN World Drug Report 2010, Afghanistan has produced 90 per cent of the world's illicit opium in recent years. A lot of that has come from the province in which Australian troops are stationed.

Under our eyes... opium poppy fields in Afghanistan. Credit:AP

As for the government we support, the US reporter Gretchen Peters says in her 2009 book Seeds of Terror: "No one has much hope for the corrupt and inept administration of Hamid Karzai. The President of Afghanistan, an ethnic Pashtun, derives much of his political support from the country's Pashtun-dominated south, where he has resisted efforts to curtail poppy cultivation."

Peters says the foreign presence in Afghanistan has done little to affect the growing of opium, which is often controlled – and profited from – by the Taliban. The only good news is that many terrorists have been seduced by the easy money on offer.

Says one top US military official: "There's a very small core of true believers still left in the Taliban. But our intel is that most of the guys are just in it [now] to make a buck."

This does not mean they want an end to the war. A former Afghan minister told Peters: "Drug smugglers do not want to see this country become stable."