TALIBAN PROHIBITS OPIUM PRODUCTION

The poppy fields of Afghanistan's Golden Crescent, normally the source of
three-quarters of the world's heroin, have been transformed this year,
according to United Nations drugs officials.

After a detailed two-week tour, they say that few of the 70,000 hectares
formerly covered by the opium crop are still in bloom.

The fundamentalist Taliban regime ordered the country's farmers to stop
growing poppies following an edict by Mullah Omar, the supreme religious
leader, that opium cultivation is un-Islamic.

But the move has little to do with a new religious stance from the Islamic
fundamentalist movement, which has been happy to bolster its coffers with
the proceeds of the drugs trade. Rather, it is a cynical effort to win UN
recognition and with it the lifting of sanctions and restoration of foreign
aid. Western diplomats believe that if the tactic fails, poppy growing will
resume.

In the meantime, the regime is believed to be taking advantage of soaring
heroin prices - up four-fold in a year - to release controlled supplies
from their stockpiles of the roughly refined drug on to the market.

The biggest financial losers of the cutback in poppy-growing are the
country's already impoverished farmers. The replacement crops of wheat and
vegetables are much less lucrative. Some families have been forced to sell
their young daughters into marriage to pay debts.

American officials confirm that there has been a substantial drop in Afghan
poppy cultivation, but believe the team from the UN Drug Control Program is
being overly optimistic by saying the crop has been wiped out.

The new Bush administration will block any moves to rehabilitate the
Taliban diplomatically while Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi terrorism
suspect, remains in Afghanistan.

Four of his alleged followers are on trial in New York, accused of taking
part in the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Officials at the Drug Enforcement Agency believe the Taliban thinks it is
holding an unbeatable hand.

Taliban soldiers are enforcing the opium ban by threatening to arrest
village elders and mullahs. Farmers who defy the edict are being arrested
and their fields uprooted and destroyed.

More than 30,000 farmers in one opium-growing province, Helmand, have fled,
joining the country's 80,000 internal refugees. Others have joined the
170,000 Afghans who have fled to Pakistan.