US TARGETS OPIUM TRADE TO DESTABILISE TALIBAN

AMERICA'S shadow war on terrorism could start with a strike on the source
of the Taliban's economic power, the opium stocks which provide the basis
for 75% of the world's heroin and 90% of Western Europe's supply.

The mission profile fits perfectly with US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's declaration yesterday that the campaign to close down the
world's terrorist networks will be conducted largely "from the shadows".
With the Pakistan border closed to the lucrative narcotics' trade, the mule
convoys transporting the raw opium will be forced to head north via
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazhakstan.

Narcotics earn the Taliban an estimated £6bn a year to fund its civil war
with the Northern Alliance opposition forces, a serious irony in a ravaged
country where the average income is less than £10 a month and five million
people survive at subsistence level on UN food handouts.

Osama bin Laden's cut of the profits for arranging money-laundering
facilities courtesy of the Chechen mafia is at least £500m annually.

Under UN pressure to halt trafficking or face increasingly harsh sanctions,
the Taliban last year imposed a ban on poppy growing. But there was no
order to destroy the 4000 tonnes already stockpiled.

Intelligence sources say the ban was merely a ploy to inflate heroin prices
in the West by creating an artificial shortage after several years of
bumper crops.

The mountainous wilderness which makes up the Afghan border with the former
Soviet republics to the north, the drug distribution route, is ideal
terrain for ambush and custom-made for the US special forces and British
SAS now operating in the area.

At least two military airbases in Uzbekistan have been made available to
the US-led coalition. Supply flights have been arriving there since last
week to deliver the men and equipment needed for reconnaissance and
interdiction missions.

Another option is to spray the poppy fields with chemicals, including an
experimental fungus which kills the plants at their roots.

But with winter fast approaching in the region, it would be another two to
three months before the tactic would begin to pay off as the poppies grew
again. The other concern is that allied aircraft would have to fly "low and
slow" to be effective, making them vulnerable to ground fire and
shoulder-fired missiles.

The Taliban is believed to have several hundred of the Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles supplied to them by the CIA in the 1980s to combat
the Soviets' helicopter gunships.

Military sources say sending fighting patrols in to burn existing
stockpiles of opium located by satellite and pilotless drones would make
more sense, by depriving the regime of an immediate source of income.

Using expensive bombers and £750,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles to bombard
terrorist training camps, and the handful of barracks which have survived
20 years of internal warfare, would also prove less than cost-effective.

The two areas where conventional "target sets" exist are on the
battlefronts facing the Panjshir Valley 30 miles north of Kabul, the
capital, and on the major front along the Oxus river line to the north west.

Carpet-bombing Taliban positions with flights of vintage B52 bombers could
turn the tide in the hard-pressed and outnumbered Northern Alliance's
favour on both battlefields.

A single sortie by three of the Vietnam-era warhorses can deliver 30 tonnes
of bombs and tear up half a square mile of territory from a safe height of
30,000 feet in less than half a minute.

Given that most of the Taliban's own 20,000 mujahideen and the 8000 mainly
Arab and Chechen volunteers aiding their war effort have never had to
endure the physical or psychological impact of such concentrated firepower,
a relative handful of strikes could be militarily decisive.