Should we tie drug-war aid to Iranian sanctions?

This sounds like one of those conundrums in which a mother-in-law, a new Cadillac, and a high cliff play prominent roles.  The Iranians have quietly received Western aid for their successful opium-interdiction efforts that keep Afghan heroin off the streets of Europe and the US, despite the hostility in other areas of the Iranian-Western standoff.  The program has succeeded in stopping most of the heroin at the Iranian border through an intricate series of barriers and natural defenses that traps the smugglers and puts them in the hands of a rather unpleasant security force.

Now, however, the Western nations who have contributed funds and technology (the US is not among them) have decided to make their support contingent on Tehran ending their uranium enrichment — which has some wondering who will be hardest hit by a collapse in the Iranian interdiction efforts:

The incentive package has been widely endorsed as a way out of the impasse. But adding the drug battle to the mix could be counter-productive, some U.N. officials say.

A “heroin tsunami” could hit Europe if the drug interdiction by Iran is weakened, warned Antonio Maria Costa, the director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

And it may also impact another theater in the war on terror:

Taliban fighters help finance their battles by taxing Afghanistan’s opium farmers, whose poppies provide the raw material for heroin. The West has had little success reducing the huge opium crop in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban is strongest.

Overall opium production in Afghanistan has more than doubled in the last four years — and smuggling the drug into Iran is the first step toward reaching Western markets. Afghanistan produced 93% of the world’s opium last year, and about 50% of the drugs leaving the country flowed through Iran, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says.

So do we fight the war on terror by supporting Iranian interdiction, which starves the Taliban but gives the Iranians extra resources to conduct a fight they’d likely continue without us?  Or do we force a stronger sanction on Tehran, but at the same time help flood heroin into Western cities and enrich the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

I’d say the former.  We cannot allow al-Qaeda and the Taliban to exploit that kind of cash flow while we’re in a hot war with them.  Protecting our servicement in Afghanistan has to take the higher priority — but it’s not an easy call, especially since we’re not participating in the program at all due to our own sanctions.