AFGHANISTAN ALREADY UNDER SIEGE

Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the Central Asian country that the Bush
administration accuses of complicity in the worst terrorist act on U.S.
soil, is in the midst of its own human disaster.

A quarter of the nation's 24 million people are at risk of starvation.
Another 6 million have fled the country during the past two decades, and
thousands more are streaming out in the face of a possible attack by the
U.S. military.

The humanitarian situation has reached alarming proportions owing to the
combined effects of 22 years of conflict and the worst drought in living
memory, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a report this
week to the Security Council.

The economy is so poor that some people have been paralyzed from eating
poisonous grass, the United Nations said. Some others subsist on meals of
locusts and animal feed.

Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognize the
Taliban government. That limits the nation's commerce to smuggling arms,
gems and electronic goods, trafficking in narcotics and exporting dried
fruit. The country has no functioning central bank and its latest economic
data is 20 years old. It's not even clear how many people live there: The
last census was in 1973. If you want numbers, they're out there, but
they're all wrong," said Amin Tarzi, an Afghanistan expert at of the
Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. "Right now,
there is no economy."

Tarzi said he managed to enter the nation in 1996 and saw the currency, the
afghani, depreciate by 400 percent in two days. Since then, citizens have
abandoned the currency for the Pakistan rupee, he says.

Afghanistan has no manufacturing base and no source of fuel of its own. Its
shepherds and farmers are at risk from 10 million land mines left over from
a decade of battle between the Soviet Union and U.S.-backed resistance
fighters.

One in five children die before their fifth birthday. Of those who make it
that far, only one in four boys, and almost no girls, attend school,
according to the United Nations.

Afghanistan's separation from the world economy is partly behind the
country's reliance on smuggling and narcotics trafficking as sources of income.

Smuggling and the opium trade were eight times the size of the country's
official exports of $111 million last year, according to U.N. data. Most of
those exports went to Pakistan, which has now said it will close the
1,500-mile border with Afghanistan.

As opium production grew over the last 20 years, Afghanistan also became
"an open war economy, the linchpin in a vast regional trade of arms,
gemstones and many different kinds of contraband,"the UN drug office said
in a recent report.