TALEBAN WIPE OUT DRUGS PRODUCTION IN AFGANISTAN

EDINBURGH. The Taleban rulers of Afghanistan are leading candidates for
the world's most hated regime. Their latest outrage was to force the
country's shrunken Hindu population to wear yellow badges on their
clothes, and they shelter the globe's most wanted terrorist.

But the West is faced with a growing dilemma over how to respond to the
latest example of the Taleban's erratic behaviour. They seem to have
achieved at a stroke something of which the drug warriors of the United
States and Europe have only dreamed.

The UK hosts a major global conference on the world's supply of
narcotics next week, delivering on a promise that Tony Blair made at
last year's G8 summit. Some of the top names in drug enforcement will
aim to tackle the supply side of the global drugs industry, from
cultivation and production of cocaine and heroin to its marketing on the
streets.

The Taleban, de facto rulers of a country that has long been the world's
dominant supplier of raw opium, are not expected to attend. While they
rule 90 per cent of Afghanistan, they are persona non grata at
international gatherings, and have no official recognition from the
United Nations. However, the attention of the world's drug experts is
now tuned closely to what has happened to Afghanistan's opium crop.

Last July, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taleban leader, issued a decree
that the cultivation of opium poppies, the raw material for an estimated
75 per cent of Europe's heroin, and 60 per cent of the world's supply,
would cease. The Koran specifically bans alcohol and intoxification, and
the mullah ordered farmers to stop growing opium and warned young
Afghans against drug use.

Western analysts were cautious, to say the least. Opium production in
Afghanistan multiplied several times under the Taleban, contributing to
a world-wide glut that has sharply lowered heroin street prices. The
fundamentalist Taleban regime is better known for banning girls from
going to school, jailing men who trim their beards, grisly public
executions, blowing up ancient statues and sheltering the global
terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Since early this year, however, there has been a growing consensus that
the mullah's decree had achieved what all the might and money of America
so signally failed to deliver in the coca fields of Colombia - a
sweeping halt in drug production. Farmers not persuaded by Islamic
argument, or the Taleban's arsenal, had their fields ploughed for them,
it is reported.

It has convinced some Asia hands that it is time to deal with the
Taleban, at least on some level. "We don't know the reasons for
curtailing the opium poppy production," said Frederick Starr, a US
specialist on central Asia. "But they did it." The Taleban were looking
for a quid pro quo from the international community, he said, and it has
not happened.

"My first thought was seeing is believing, but now I am seeing and so
are many others," said Thomas Gouttierre, a US expert on Afghanistan.
"There are many corroborating source ... something is happening."

Europe is being urged to send emergency aid to Afghanistan to help more
than a million former opium farmers forbidden from producing the drug.
"We certainly hope the international community will provide, within the
shortest possible time, humanitarian assistance to the farmers who have
not cultivated opium this year," said Sandro Tucci, a spokesman for the
UN drug control programme.

The British government is seriously considering such aid. Britain has
allocated UKP10 million for emergency relief to drought-stricken
Afghanistan and a spokeswoman for the Department for International
Development said: "We are considering how to provide aid to the
community that were growing poppies, as a humanitarian response" to the
need created by the loss of the crop. Britain is waiting on proposals
from the UN and aid bodies, she said.

Mr Tucci called the opium cut the most dramatic change in the history of
narcotics - comparing it to 1909, when widespread opium addiction in
China produced the first international conference, in Shanghai, to
discuss drug control.

The United Nations drug control programme was the first to conclude
officially that the Taleban's ban was serious. This month the US Drug
Enforcement Agency went on the record confirming it - as has the UK's
Customs and Excise, although with a cautious note.

"We are aware that production has been cut this year," said a
spokeswoman. "It is too early to say what this will mean for
international trade routes and trade prices and street prices in the UK.
We will be closely monitoring the effects globally that this will have
on the supply of heroin."

The Taleban's evil reputation has fed widespread suspicion of a cynical
move to limit opium production while looking to court world opinion.
While opium prices on Afghanistan's borders are said to have soared to
five as much as before, there are reports of both central stockpiles of
opium and farmers with buried stashes, ready to dump on the market.

Last month, the Bush administration announced a $43 million assistance
package for Afghanistan, to help victims of a devastating drought and
famine said to have forced 700,000 people from their homes. The
secretary of state, Colin Powell, said the US was also looking for ways
to help farmers hit by the poppy ban - "a decision by the Taleban that
we welcome".

The aid deal was passionately denounced by some as a "Faustian deal"
with the devil. "I regard it as astonishing that even after the
destruction of the Buddhas [ancient statues in the Bamiyan valley], the
US is prepared to play games with these folks," said Mark Kleiman, a
drugs policy expert at the University of California. "Is there a worse
government in the world today?"

Afghanistan is to opium what Saudi Arabia is to oil - certainly for
addicts of western Europe. Through a twisting smuggling operation, via
Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and the Balkans, the country has largely
fed Europe's habit.

Hard drugs were long uncommon in Afghanistan, according to Mr
Gouttierre, who lived in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Afghan's
culture, as well as its religion, worked against them. Billboards urged
Afghans not to smoke or drink, but pray, in a country where the favoured
tipple at weddings was tea.

However, with the Soviet invasion in 1980, the soldiers brought a new
market for heroin, while Afghans fighting the invaders needed cash for
arms. In the past decade, particularly under Taleban rule, the harvest
of opium poppies has grown exponentially, driving down the world price
of heroin, enabling start-up addicts to smoke rather than inject.

About 10lb of raw opium is needed to produce 1lb of heroin. Opium inside
Afghanistan used to sell at as low as UKP10 per lb; the same quantity of
heroin carries a sale price of UKP25,000 or more in Europe or the United
States.

Surprisingly, the Taleban failed to cash in on the processing or
smuggling of their crop. The Taleban were estimated to have collected as
little as UKP60 million a year, leaving the richest profits to mafias
and middlemen from Sicilians to Russians to Pakistanis, from Kiev to
Kosovo.

Opium production has gone from more than 3,000 tons, it is estimated, to
possibly as low as 250. While prices have risen tenfold inside
Afghanistan, it is said, the impact of the production cut is only now
hitting the wider market.

Mr Starr believes Europe urgently needs to reassess its Afghan policy.
"Our policy has been all sticks and no carrot. In Afghanistan, there are
no good guys.

"The US is spending $1.2 billion in Colombia in effect trying to deal
with the effects in our addiction. The case in Afghanistan is a result
of European and Russian addiction. This is a country and a region being
destroyed by the addictions of others.

"The Europeans basically view this as being beyond their field of
vision. It seems to me, however inept and clumsy the US drug effort is
in South America, it is at least built on some recognition of
responsibility, and that is lacking in Europe."

Mr Starr, like other experts, is watching whether opium production now
shifts towards eastern Turkey, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang
region of western China.

The failure of the world community to react to the opium ban may have
fed the fury that led to the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues
earlier this year, Mr Starr and others suggest.

Arif Ayub, Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, said recently that
Mullah Omar was enraged by the West slapping more sanctions on the
Taleban after the terrorist attack on the US navy ship Cole, which was
blamed on Bin Laden's network, instead of rewarding it for eradicating
poppies.

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has honoured its responsibility to
the world," said Amir Mohammed Hakaune, the top anti-drug official in
eastern Afghanistan.

"If tragedy comes to our farmers, the blame goes not to us but to the
international community."

Bizarrely, the Taleban recently claimed it was their opium production
cut that had caused the US economy to falter. "What economic analysts
will not tell you is that opium … was the main instigator of the
economic miracle" under the Clinton administration, said an article in
the latest edition of the Taleban's official magazine.