There is concern that our continued efforts in Afghanistan are being undermined by widespread corruption within the administration of President Hamid Karzai. What few people are talking about is the opium cultivation and heroin production that is fueling this corruption. But should we do anything about it? Can we do anything about it? Not really.

Controlling opium production is a Sisyphean task -- hopelessly futile. Trying to eradicate the crop creates perverse incentives that actually lead to increased production, as NATO allies learned in the years following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. However, if we do nothing about opium cultivation, farmers will naturally overproduce, stocks of stored opium will accumulate, prices will fall further and farmers will eventually abandon the crop of their own free will (as they did in 2000 and as they are starting to do now).

This year, the United Nations issued two reports suggesting significant drops in opium crop cultivation, suggesting that U.S.- and British-funded crop eradication and alternative development schemes were finally paying off. But the continued drop in the number of acres planted with poppies is not all that it seems. Thanks to increasing crop yields (because of more intensive planting and more efficient techniques), new opium production has fallen by far less than the numbers would suggest. Annual production levels are still double what they were in the decade before 9/11 and during the first few years of this war.

We should not be surprised. Western anti-drug policies are founded on three misguided assumptions, most of which have been refuted by highly respected academic studies that policymakers have rarely bothered to read.

The first false assumption is that crop eradication actually leads to a reduction in production. Graham Farrell, who worked with the U.N. Drug Control Program in the 1990s, looked at the effect of crop eradication efforts in different parts of the world and found that, in most cases, cultivation increased in the growing season following a crop eradication effort. It's a counterintuitive conclusion, but it makes sense. If farmers know that some crops will be destroyed, they will plant more in the expectation that prices will rise from the induced scarcity. Sometimes they will plant separate fields in outlying areas, or farmers in countries and provinces neighboring the area targeted for eradication might increase cultivation.

The second false assumption is that subsidized crop substitution programs help poor farmers. Discovering too late that eradication was counterproductive, the U.S. government decided this summer to switch its efforts from eradication to subsidized crop replacement schemes. However, rarely have alternative development programs worked, unless farmers are growing new crops that yield a naturally higher profit margin. Crop subsidy schemes are limited in duration and lack the funds to be sustainable.

The third false assumption is that these counternarcotics programs will win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan's rural poor. Improving transportation and trade infrastructure to help get legal crops to market would go further. But for those efforts to be sustained, the security situation needs to be improved first.

If all of these policies are counterproductive, what should NATO allies do in Afghanistan? Nothing at the extreme upstream end of the supply chain. Opium and heroin production has increased at such an alarming rate in the last eight years that the resulting supply glut has led to a dramatic fall in prices. Consequently, farmers in many parts of the country are switching to legal crops of their own free will.

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