TALIBAN SEEM TO BE MAKING GOOD ON OPIUM BAN, U.N. SAYS

Initial results from a survey of opium-growing areas of Afghanistan in
recent days indicate that the Taliban may have succeeded in sharply
reducing the annual poppy crop, astonished United Nations narcotics-control
officials say.

Last year, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, which is
derived from poppies and is the material from which heroin is made.

Poppies are now in bloom in the Afghan fields, allowing aerial and ground
surveys to be done across large areas to test the ban on opium production
by the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic movement that rules most of the
country. The ban was announced last year to skeptical response from
narcotics experts.

On Monday, the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention's regional office for Afghanistan and Pakistan said that surveys
in the northern provinces of Nangarhar, Laghman and Kunar, which together
contain more than 25 percent of the total land that had been devoted to the
poppy crop, found no significant signs of cultivation this year. Similar
reports are beginning to come in from Helmand, which had 52 percent of the
land devoted to the crop last year. The survey ends on Feb. 10 and a final
report will be issued sometime later.

Bernard Frahi, a French expert on narcotics and organized crime who led the
survey teams in Afghanistan from Feb. 1-4, said in a report that his
mission visited farmland known to include about 2,000 major pockets of
opium production. The inspection was done by all-terrain vehicles and on
foot. "Although it is hard to believe," Mr. Frahi, the regional director,
wrote to his headquarters in Vienna, where the United Nations drug program
is based, "No poppy field has been identified in the area."

Mr. Frahi said he was accompanied on his inspection tour by drug officers
from Canada and Norway and one Pakistani agricultural expert attached to
the narcotics affairs section of the American Embassy in Islamabad.

The narcotics experts found that Afghan farmers were trying to grow wheat,
onions, garlic and other crops. Afghans told the inspection team, however,
that they were very fearful about their livelihoods. Alternate crops
require a steady supply of seeds, fertilizer and water -- all of which are
in short supply, and Afghanistan under the Taliban gets almost no foreign aid.

Moreover, in the last year Afghanistan has suffered the worst drought in
half a century.

The World Bank warned today that the country was headed for a major famine.
Up to a million people are in danger of starving, aid agencies say.

The United Nations issued an urgent appeal today to governments for
clothing, blankets and tents for the 100,000 Afghans who have fled to the
western city of Herat to escape the drought and fighting between the
Taliban and an opposition force that is clinging to about 5 percent of the
country.

About 500 people have frozen to death around Herat in recent weeks, United
Nations officials say.

The United States, which under the Clinton administration led a campaign in
the United Nations to impose sanctions on the Taliban for their refusal to
hand over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi financier of Islamic militancy, said
today that it would fly relief goods to the battered country.

Tents, blankets and some water supplies are expected to be flown by the
United States Agency for International Development to Pakistan, where more
than 150,000 new refugees need help, as well as to Afghanistan, American
diplomats said in Islamabad. The plane is scheduled to reach Herat by Friday.