AFGHAN BAN ON GROWING OF OPIUM IS UNRAVELING

A highly successful government ban on the growing of opium poppies in
Afghanistan, which had been by far the biggest source of opium in the
world, has begun to unravel as the United States presses its war against
the ruling Taliban, American and United Nations officials say.

Reports from Afghanistan received last week by the United Nations show that
farmers are planting or preparing to plant opium poppies in at least two
important growing areas. Recent American intelligence reports also suggest
that the year-old ban may be eroding as the military assault continues,
United States officials said.

"They may have told people they can plant, they may tell people nothing and
allow them to plant, or there may be enough chaos with the war that it
won't matter what the Taliban says," said the State Department's senior
official for international narcotics issues, R. Rand Beers. "We had a
situation that showed promise that is now headed in absolutely the wrong
direction."

Even a wholesale collapse of the ban might not have an immediate impact on
the availability and price of opium and heroin, one of its derivatives, in
illegal drug markets around the world.

A continued flow of opium from stockpiles inside Afghanistan has so far
kept the prices of those drugs stable in Europe, and officials expect those
reserves to last for perhaps another year.

But after paying relatively little attention to the problem in recent
years, American officials are now closely focused on Afghanistan's drug
trade, saying that taxes on farmers and traders have become a crucial
source of revenue for the Taliban and that drug money may be used to
finance terrorist activities.

"The urgency has increased," the administrator of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, Asa Hutchinson, said in an interview.

The challenge that Washington now faces is, in some part, of its own
making. In the 1980's opium production flourished in Afghanistan with the
involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the
Central Intelligence Agency.

In the 1990's, as the country's poppy fields expanded, the United States
refused to deal with the Taliban government and focused its drug control
efforts in other regions that were thought to be supplying greater amounts
of drugs to American markets.

"It's something that just wasn't on our radar screen," a senior American
official said of Afghanistan's drug trade. "That heroin wasn't coming this
way - it was mostly going to Europe. We were worried about other things
going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't want to deal with the Taliban."

While some officials suggest that American military forces might now try to
target caches of opium stored around Afghanistan, others acknowledge
privately that they have scant information about where those caches might be.

More broadly, American officials admit that they have poor intelligence
about the makeup and operations of Afghanistan's drug trafficking
organizations and know even less about how those groups might be linked to
Osama bin Laden or other suspected terrorists.

Although opium has been produced in Afghanistan for centuries, it began to
boom after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Often, officials said, the convoys
of donkeys and trucks that smuggled arms to the mujahedeen returned to
Pakistan with raw opium, sometimes with the assent of the Pakistani or
American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.

From there the drug was usually converted to morphine base or smuggled to
Turkey to be refined into heroin.

When the Pakistani government began cracking down on the trade in the
1990's, some opium farmers and traffickers whose tribes straddled the
border simply moved their operations into Afghanistan.

By the early 1990's Afghanistan was starting to approach the opium output
of Myanmar, the world's largest producer. As the Taliban swept across
Afghanistan in the mid-1990's, American officials hoped initially that they
would be allies in the drug fight because intoxicants are condemned by
Islam. But that did not happen, in part because opium was such a good cash
crop.

"At first we though they would be good for our purposes because they were
so strict," said a drug enforcement official who dealt with Afghanistan
during the first years of the Taliban's Islamic rule and spoke on condition
of anonymity. "But the problem just grew, because it was such a good cash
crop and they were in such dire straits economically."

For its own part, the Drug Enforcement Administration was shifting some of
its resources away from the region. In 1997 a study by the agency found
that although Afghanistan and Pakistan were still the source of about 20
percent of the heroin seized in East Coast cities, nearly three-fourths of
the market there was being supplied by Colombia and Mexico. The next year,
with the dangers to American drug agents rising, the agency decided to
close two of its four offices in Pakistan.

"We decided we didn't care about Afghanistan, because it didn't affect the
shores of the United States," a senior American official said. "We were wrong."

In 1997 the Taliban pledged a one-third reduction in poppy cultivation and
pleaded for development aid to the affected farmers. But the ban was not
enforced, and very little foreign aid was forthcoming.

The United States and European governments were appalled by the Taliban's
human rights record, and drugs were a second-tier interest.

The United Nations drug control program used modest development projects to
reduce poppy cultivation in a few small areas of Afghanistan, and the
United States contributed $3.2 million to the effort over five years. By
comparison, it spent $4.2 million this year in Laos, the world's
third-largest opium producer, and will spend $399 million next year to
fight drug trafficking in Colombia.

American officials had ample reason to be skeptical. In 1997 the poppy
fields stretched over 144,345 acres, a United Nations survey found.

Two years later the figure was 224,819 acres.

The trade was a vital source of revenue for the impoverished Taliban
government. Local Taliban officials took a 10 percent tax from poppy
growers, as they did from other farmers, and an Islamic tax of as much as
20 percent on opium traders and transporters. Some warlords aligned with
the opposition Northern Alliance were also deeply involved in the trade,
United States officials said.

In 1998 and 1999, United States intelligence data also revealed that larger
laboratories for refining opium into morphine base and heroin were popping
up in areas where they could exist only with the Taliban's assent, several
American officials said. As the opium output rose, Afghanistan was
processing more of its own heroin to supply newer markets in Eastern Europe
and Russia, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia.

When the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, decreed a complete
ban on poppy growing in July 2000, few foreign drug officials expected any
results. That year, according to C.I.A. estimates, the country's opium
output surged to 4,042 tons, accounting for about 70 percent of the opium
produced in the world. United Nations figures were slightly lower.

But within two months, officials discovered that the poppy ban had been
astonishingly effective, cutting Afghanistan's production to 81.6 tons,
most of it from poppies grown in the roughly 10 percent of the country
under Northern Alliance control.

Although opium prices soared inside Afghanistan - leading some foreign
officials to suspect a Taliban ploy to increase their revenues - a steady
flow of opium from stockpiles that are largely controlled by autonomous
traffickers along the country's borders kept the availability of heroin
high and the price low in Europe.

Since last month there have been conflicting reports about whether the ban
would stand. But on Friday, the head of the United Nations drug control
program for the region, Bernard Frahi, said he had just received reports
from Afghanistan that poppy fields had been prepared for planting in the
southwestern province of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, and that planting
had already begun in some parts of Nangarhar, another important poppy
growing province.

United States officials said intelligence reports indicated that Taliban
officials in some areas had signaled an end to the ban.

"In a period of uncertainty, when farmers have lost two-thirds of their
income by switching to wheat, when there are no alternative development
programs, the farmers will grow opium," Mr. Frahi said in a telephone
interview from Islamabad.