A U.N. AIDE SAYS TALIBAN IS REDUCING POPPY CROP

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 8 — The United Nations' top antinarcotics official
said today that the Taliban government in Afghanistan appears to be
succeeding in slowing significantly the cultivation of opium poppies for
the first time since the radical Islamic movement seized power four years ago.

Pino Arlacchi, the leader of the United Nations Drug Control Program, said
in an interview that initial surveys of Afghanistan in the midst of the
annual opium-planting season show that a July edict against its cultivation
seems to be taking effect across the country, the world's largest producer
of opium.

At the same time, Mr. Arlacchi said, his agency has now amassed strong
evidence that local drug lords along the northern border with Tajikistan
have stockpiled a supply of opium — and its derivatives, morphine and
heroin — adequate to supply Europe and the United States for up to three years.

Those dealers, he said, know no factional allegiance. They may be
merchants, local officials, even mullahs. They operate in territories
controlled by the Taliban or their enemies, the remnants of the former
government now known as the Northern Alliance — or by nobody.

"We have detailed evidence of the existence of a huge system of stockpiles
and deposits and laboratories in Afghanistan, particularly in the northern
part along the border," said Mr. Arlacchi, an Italian narcotics expert who
helped bring down the Sicilian Mafia a decade ago.

"We know of 40 deposits, whose turnover reaches around 100 tons of heroin
every year," he said, speaking from Rome, where he is preparing to open an
international conference on transnational crime on Tuesday in Palermo.
"Just to give you an idea what this means, 100 tons is the annual demand of
all European addicts, plus addicts in the U.S. And we believe there are
other stockpiles in other parts of the country."

Mr. Arlacchi, who is still under a Mafia death threat — in the Afghan
context he calls it a "Sicilian fatwa" — said that using information from
the ground and aerial surveillance "we are able to locate stockpiles within
two meters of the location."

"We also know the criminals who control them," he said. "Each of these
deposits is protected by a group of heavily armed people — it could be 20
people but it could also be 100 or 150 people — under the control of these
criminal leaders, who sometimes are traders, sometimes local fighters,
sometimes local authorities; for instance, the chief of the customs office
in the area, the mayor of the village. We have satellite evidence of this."

"No credible policy to eliminate or reduce cultivation can work in
Afghanistan if there is not parallel destruction of these stockpiles," he
added.

In the next month, Mr. Arlacchi hopes to send about 70 drug control agents,
many of them Afghan-born agronomists, into the countryside to survey crops.
By the end of January or early February, opium poppies will be in bloom and
easy to detect.

"But even if we have a sharp reduction in production in Afghanistan, this
will not have any significant immediate consequence for the supply of
heroin to Western markets," he said. "Reduction of cultivation is not enough."

Mr. Arlacchi said the July decision of the Taliban's supreme religious
leader, Mullah Omar, to ban all opium cultivation risked sending countless
Afghan farmers into destitution and perhaps creating political problems.
But a better military position and popular support has helped strengthen
the hand of the Taliban leadership, he said.

The Taliban appear to be creating a grassroots system to back the edict, he
said, sometimes involving local religious leaders, authorities and elders.
"In a couple of cases we have heard also of groups of farmers put in jail
for two or three weeks for having not complied with the ban," he said.

Mr. Arlacchi added that it would take time to convince Western nations to
help the drug-control program in Afghanistan, as long as the country is
under Taliban control.

In the short term, he said, he is confident that emergency relief through
the United Nations will be available to help farmers who give up poppy
cultivation. But in the long run, the Taliban will have to build
international credibility, he said.

They have already learned that in narcotics control, they cannot win
outside assistance simply by using promises or threats. "The Taliban
realized that this strategy does not work," he said.