RISE OF DRUG TRADE THREAT TO AFGHANISTAN'S SECURITY

SAYAD, Afghanistan -- After decades of occupation and conflict, this
nation is finally embracing democracy as returns from Afghanistan's
first presidential election point to interim leader Hamid Karzai as
the victor. But a competing power structure no Afghan voted for is
lurking just off the political stage: a deeply rooted and
ever-expanding opium industry. Afghanistan is at once the world's
newest democracy and its largest producer of heroin: This year, the
country had a record opium crop. The narcotic feeds 95% of Europe's
addiction and generates an estimated $30 billion in revenue. Most
comes from street sales outside Afghanistan. But even the $2.5 billion
that stays in Afghanistan amounts to a third of its economy.

The money corrupts government officials, who tolerate trafficking, and
finances warlords and terror groups like the Taliban who encourage
cultivation and elicit protection money from smugglers. National and
international leaders say an infant democracy and a narco-economy
cannot co-exist here. One must gain leverage over the other. "The
country has made huge progress on the political side," says Antonio
Maria Costa, director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
in Vienna. "On the narcotics front, I would not only say there has
been no progress, but a worsening of the situation."

Doug Wankel, a former Drug Enforcement Administration official who is
point man for the U.S. counternarcotics initiative at the American
Embassy in Kabul, says the opium industry is "financing terrorism.

It's financing subversive activities. It's financing warlordism. ...
And if it's a threat to the government of Afghanistan, it's a direct
threat to the national security interests of the United States."

Final U.N. figures on this year's opium harvest will be out early next
month. But officials like Robert Charles, U.S. assistant secretary of
State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, predict
a record opium poppy cultivation covering a cumulative area just less
than 500 square miles -- about the size of the city of Los Angeles.

Before anything can be done, the nation must select a new
leader.

By Tuesday, results from the Oct. 9 vote showed Karzai had 55.5% of
the votes, 39 points ahead of his closest rival.

An official announcement declaring Karzai the winner is expected later
this week.

Costa, Wankel, Charles and others say that the president must move
quickly to cleanse the government of drug-corrupted provincial
governors and central government Cabinet ministers to begin reversing
the drug's grip on Afghan government.

"He needs to begin the process of wringing out any narcotic influence
at any levels in order to be able to go forward," says Charles, whose
office already is training Afghan police, border patrol officers,
judges and prosecutors necessary to carry out a drug crackdown. There
is a growing sense of urgency within a U.S. administration eager to
avoid any tarnish on what is otherwise a foreign-policy success story.
"Amazing, isn't it?" President Bush exclaimed of the Afghan election
at an Oct. 9 Iowa campaign stop. "Freedom is beautiful."

Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID), which is developing an alternative livelihood program to
discourage Afghanistan farmers from growing poppies, says, "The
president is quite concerned about this and has given us instructions
to move this into high gear." 'Because we need the money' Nowhere is
the evidence of a rising drug tide more evident than among the
dirt-poor, subsistence farmers of the small village of Sayad, 10 miles
north of a sprawling U.S. military base at Bagram outside Kabul.
Farmers tilling the arid fields and living in the mud-walled homes say
they have lived for generations off the tomatoes, cotton, wheat, rice
and corn grown on tiny parcels of land.

Until now. Last spring, the village was visited by men from Nangarhar
Province, southeast of here astride the trade route from Kabul to
Islamabad, Pakistan. The men came with poppy seeds and a promise to
pay 10,000 Afghanis -- worth $225 to $250 -- for each kilogram, or 2.2
pounds, of raw, harvested opium.

Mahrwouf, 20, who like many Afghans, goes by one name, says he and
most of the other farmers took up the offer.

On his five acres, Mahrwouf harvested just under 9 pounds of opium
this year. He earned nearly $1,000, more money than he's ever seen. It
paid off the debt from his wedding six months ago. "The villagers are
very poor people, so they decided to plant the poppy," he says. "We'll
do it again.

Because we need the money." In an agrarian nation where per-capita
income is $186 a year, 16% of the roads are paved, 12% of the people
have access to a sanitation system and barely two out of 1,000 have
use of a telephone, that kind of cash crop is irresistible to the
estimated 264,000 farmers.

Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who
spent 20 years in the USA, has for more than a year expressed concern
that his country could tumble into a "narco-mafia state" where real
power emanates from a group of drug kingpins, rather than a duly
elected central government.

"Opium, unfortunately, is the ideal crop for a drought-stricken
country and for a country where labor-intensive work is the demand,"
Ghani says. "It's a deeply threatening phenomenon."

He says the massive turnout in the election gives him hope that a
leader with a popular mandate can move against a rising drug tide. The
challenges include: Taking on warlords governing poppy producing
provinces, such as Helmand and Nangarhar. Karzai has demonstrated a
willingness to do this. Most recently, he replaced longtime-warlord
Ismail Khan as governor of Herat and deployed U.S.-trained Afghan
national army troops to provide security. Arresting drug kingpins,
some of whom have sizable militias.

Charles says there are six to 12 top Afghan smugglers who must be
targeted.

He identifies two: Haji Juma Khan, who has links with the Taliban, and
former Taliban money supplier Haji Bashir Noorzai, who is tied to
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network.

According to House International Relations Committee testimony this
year, Noorzai smuggles 4,400 lbs. of heroin out of the Kandahar region
to al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan every eight weeks. Destroying drug
labs and refineries. Thomas O'Connell, assistant secretary of Defense
for special operations and low-intensity conflict, has testified
before Congress that the U.S. government, through various means
including satellites, can pinpoint labs and refineries. Afghans just
need the manpower to go after them.

Instituting an alternative-livelihood program that goes beyond merely
encouraging the growing of alternative crops.

Rural development programs, education and even non-farm employment
opportunities would need to be offered, according to a September study
by the World Bank. This would require massive international funding,
Ghani says.

The last step is crucial.

According to the World Bank study, opium's grip on the Afghan economy,
with its weak government and lack of security, is unprecedented
because of the nation's reliance on drug revenue.

So suffocating is the illicit industry here that if an internationally
supported eradication and interdiction program was immediately
successful, the economy would slip into a recession.

"Time is always our enemy," says Charles, who warns that the drug
industry is becoming even more deeply entrenched in Afghan economy and
society. Under the December 2001 Bonn peace agreement that laid out a
nation-building plan for Afghanistan, the British agreed to take the
lead on counternarcotics, the Germans on training police and the
Italians on building a judicial system.

The United States, tasked with building an Afghan national army, has
provided the largest security force: 18,000 U.S. troops to pursue
remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

But the other countries are not moving fast enough on their
commitments, says Wankel, the Kabul-based counternarcotics
coordinator. So the United States has stepped in with money and
resources to push all three areas. "They don't seem to have the same
sense of urgency," Wankel says of the coalition partners. "Where we
see it's not moving at the ... level or the speed we think, we're
going to step in and we're going to work with them to help them get it
to the level and to the speed which we think it needs." He adds, "We
really believe that within two years, we've got to see the pendulum
swing."

Signs of growing sophistication For now, the pendulum is moving in the
wrong direction, according to the World Bank. Since the demise of the
Taliban, the flowering plant has spread from the top-producing poppy
provinces to 28 of the nation's 32 provinces. Poppy cultivation now
employs an estimated 2 million Afghans, who can earn about $7 a day,
more than two times the average scale for unskilled Afghan labor. The
opium they produce earns a farmer 57 times as much as wheat, the next
most profitable crop. But it has had an insidious effect on the
poorest planters. Farm prices for poppy have declined as production
has increased. Many farmers, who borrowed to pay for staples to get
them through the winter, are falling into debt. Rural credit lines for
farmers would be another important facet of an alternative livelihood
program. Among the reasons officials feel a sense of urgency is that
the drug industry here is not yet an organized, price-controlling
cartel as with Colombia and cocaine.

But the system is showing new signs of sophistication. In the past,
most heroin was processed in neighboring countries along the smuggling
route to Europe. Now, it's processed here. Eradication efforts have
had mixed results.

A 2002 British-led initiative to destroy fields and compensate the
farmers and an effort in 2003 to encourage local governors to destroy
poppy crops failed.

The compensation program only encouraged other farmers, eager for
government compensation, to grow poppies. And local governors used
their eradication efforts to punish enemies. With British and U.S.
assistance, there was limited success this year with interdiction and
eradication by newly organized central government forces. Most
notably, a British-trained 150-man commando-style unit known as the
Afghan Special Narcotics Force in the past six months has destroyed 50
tons of opiates, 32 processing labs and made 20 arrests.

The unit, also called Force 333, reports directly to Karzai and
Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, and uses U.S. transport
helicopters and pilots to transport them on missions. The United
States, meanwhile, is paying Afghan laborers $10 a day to chop down
poppy plants.

Under this program, about 2,000 acres have been eradicated.

To offset the common practice of arrested drug dealers bribing their
way to freedom, the United States will begin training a core Afghan
group of 10 prosecutors, 10 police investigators and five judges to
act as a special task force to prosecute high-profile drug smugglers.
The unit, Wankel says, should be up and running by March. It will work
out of offices in a refurbished section of Pol-e-Charki Prison outside
Kabul. Wankel says the new program could cost the United States $300
million to $400 million in the next few years.

Bill Rammell, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs, who oversees British efforts in Afghanistan, says his
nation is spending $150-$200 million on counternarcotics there.
"We do have the plans and the strategy in place to meet our targets and
begin to reverse, I would hope, the tide by this time next year," Rammell
says.

But Mahrwouf and other Afghan farmers who have limited choices and almost no
enforcement see only opium in their future. "If the Americans would give me
a job at Bagram air base," he says with a grin. "I would stop growing it."
Contributing: Zoroya reported in Afghanistan, Leinwand reported in
Washington