TALIBAN SHUTS DOWN MOST AFGHAN POPPY PRODUCTION

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban
religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -
once the world's largest producer - since banning poppy cultivation in July.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks
searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so
few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan
this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said
Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and
Pakistan.

He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat
alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier - a sea of
blood-red poppies.

A State Department official said all the information the United States has
received so far indicates that the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not
believe it was eliminated.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium - the milky
substance drained from the poppy plant - which was then converted into
heroin and sold in Europe and North America.

It was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said - more
than all other countries combined, including the "Golden Triangle," where
the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing
before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict
making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of
Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed
farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed
Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -
areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last
year, Frahi said. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces
that last year had been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there,
Frahi said. The rest - about 175,000 acres - was clean.

"We have to look at the situation with careful optimism," said Sandro Tucci
of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that,
as a result, there hasn't been any production of opium - but that officials
would keep checking.

The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would
make its own estimate of the poppy crop. Information received so far
suggests that there will be a decrease, but how much is not yet clear, he said.

"We do not think by any stretch of the imagination that poppy cultivation
in Afghanistan has been eliminated. But we, like the rest of the world,
welcome positive news."