TALIBAN TURNS TO DRUGS

The Taliban Is Reported To Have Already Lifted A Ban On Poppy Cultivation
Amid Western Fears That It Will Also Unload Its Large Stockpiles Of Opium
And Heroin

Bracing for a new war, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban is desperate for money.
Unfortunately its war-ravaged and impoverished country has only one very
exportable commodity: drugs. Some press reports say the Taliban has told
farmers they can plant poppy seeds if the United States attacks. In fact,
according to a Western intelligence source monitoring Taliban-run Voice of
Shariat radio, the Taliban has already scrapped a ban on poppy cultivation,
clearing the way for renewed opium and heroin production after little more
than a year's break.

The source says the move was announced on September 2--nine days before
hijacked airliners slammed into New York and Washington. The timing however
didn't fuel suspicions that the Taliban had prior knowledge of the
terrorist attacks, the source adds. Instead it appeared consistent with
widespread speculation among farmers and drug traffickers in August that
the ban might be rescinded. The poppy planting season in Afghanistan starts
in late September and farmers would need to know in advance that they had
to buy seeds.

Western intelligence officials also expect the Taliban to release large
stockpiles of opium and heroin. The coalition being formed by the United
States is well aware of the imminent threat of tonnes of Afghan drugs being
dumped on foreign markets. Says a Western intelligence official: "Naval
forces in the [Persian] Gulf and armed forces on the ground will be looking
to intercept and destroy drug shipments."

Though Afghanistan's borders are now officially closed and surveillance has
been tightened the flood of Afghan drugs may well continue, as smuggling
routes across the northern frontier are unlikely to be affected. According
to Vienna-based narcotics enforcement officers, a well-established route to
Europe is via the Central Asian republics and a network of Chechen
gangsters and Kosovo-Albanian syndicates.

Once best-known for its hashish, Afghanistan started producing opium and
its derivative heroin as a direct legacy of years of war and the
destruction of its traditional cash crops. According to estimates by the
United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Afghanistan produced no more
than 10 tonnes of opium annually prior to the late 1970s. The amount rose
to some 300 tonnes in 1986 and by 1989--the year that Soviet forces pulled
out-- it reached 1,200 tonnes.

The withdrawal led to power struggles between factions of the former
resistance, which each needed cash to survive. So in the late 1990s,
Afghanistan overtook Burma as the world's biggest opium producer and by
1999 4,600 tonnes was harvested--more than twice Burma's production. Most
of the increase was from Helmand province, west of the Taliban headquarters
at Kandahar. The United Nations estimates the value of the opium crop "at
farmgate prices" in 1999 to be $251 million, a huge sum for such a poor
country.

Much Afghan opium is refined into heroin destined mainly for Western
Europe. In contrast, Southeast Asian heroin sells mainly in East Asia,
Australia and North America. Southeast Asian heroin, known as "China
White"--though all of it is produced in Burma's sector of the Golden
Triangle--is purer and more expensive. But Afghanistan in recent years
began producing white heroin as well as the brown powder Afghan heroin that
had been processed since the early 1990s.

The quality is not yet as good as Southeast Asian white heroin, but Thai
narcotics officials say Afghan producers smuggle heroin into Thailand and
repack it in plastic bags with well-known Southeast Asian brand names. It
is then re-exported to North America and elsewhere, disguised as more
expensive Southeast Asian heroin. Afghan-produced heroin is also smuggled
into China's Xinjiang region, where Uighur Muslim traffickers transport it
to Shanghai and other coastal cities where "white powder" is in great demand.

Osama Bin Laden's Role

Severe international criticism and U.S. and UN sanctions prompted Taliban
leader Mullah Mohammad Omar to issue a decree on July 27 last year banning
opium cultivation across the country. Independent verification by UN
observers this year indicated a very substantial reduction of the area
under poppy cultivation. However, Western narcotics officials noted that
although poppy farmers lost their income, stockpiles from earlier bumper
crops meant traffickers were not affected. Nor were the authorities, which
still taxed the processing and transportation of heroin and what poppy
production remained.

As supposed religious purists, the Taliban have an ambivalent attitude
toward drugs. A U.S. anti-narcotics official says Taliban officials
maintain cultivating opium poppies "does not violate the principles of
Islam, but that heroin processing, trafficking and the use of heroin is
wrong for all Muslims [and therefore] all heroin must be intended for
export to foreign, non-Muslim countries." A U.S. congressional panel last
December said: "Colombia and Afghanistan provide the clearest examples of
the growing convergence among drug trafficking, terrorism and organized
crime." In March this year, President George W. Bush said that both Burma
and Afghanistan, despite its opium poppy ban, hadn't done enough to be
certified as cooperating in the fight against illegal drugs.

Osama bin Laden's role is shadowy but Western intelligence officials say
that he was very upset when he lost major sources of income from several
construction businesses, which had to close down under U.S. pressure after
the bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The officials say bin Laden took revenge by extending his jihad, or holy
war, to include drug-running to the United States and Europe. One official
says he met four senior Afghan drug traffickers linked to the Taliban and
offered to help fund their shipments to Europe in return for a cut of the
profits.

Bin Laden is also said to employ drug runners for other purposes. The
Western intelligence official says established smuggling routes double as
conduits for explosives and illegal immigrants. And in order to transfer
large sums of money without leaving an obvious paper trail, bin Laden uses
the hawala system of moving funds with just a handshake and a largely
indecipherable piece of paper. If the drugs do flow, hawala could be
working even harder in the coming months.