VIOLENCE BLOOMS WITH POPPY IN AFGHANISTAN

Aid Agencies Blame The Burgeoning Drug Trade For The Country's Stubborn
Lawlessness.

DARA NOOR, Afghanistan (AP) -- A relief worker dies in an ambush on a blind
curve up a steep mountain road. Around the bend is a poppy field, a prime
suspect in a murder spree that's bogging down Afghanistan's rebuilding
while its drug trade blooms.

Aid groups are fleeing in terror. They blame much of their exodus from the
southern third of the country on its $1.2 billion export drug crop, which
purportedly finances Islamic extremist violence, ethnic blood feuds,
warlord war chests, provincial property disputes and competing political
movements.

The agencies that monitor the pulse of conflict zones point to a rise in
ambushes and execution-style slayings that coincide with the southeast's
autumn harvest of the opium-producing flora, nature's gift to the world's
heroin junkies.

"It's absolutely true that security is worse in places where people are
growing poppies," said Diane Johnston, country director for Mercy Corps,
which indefinitely suspended operations in the country last week. A member
of the Omaha, Neb.-based group was killed Aug. 7.

"Narcoterrorism" has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the
violence that's meant to keep southern and eastern Afghanistan -- the
world's poppy belt -- off-limits to outside assistance, said Paul Barker,
country director for the charity CARE.

"The revenue from the poppy trade in Afghanistan is more than all the
humanitarian aid combined," he said.

Nations have committed roughly $500 million to rebuild this central Asian
nation of dusty, gasp-inducing deserts and monolithic mountains. Poppy
revenues brought in $1.2 billion last year, according to the U.N. Office of
Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

There are about 90 international relief groups operating in Afghanistan,
but most have curtailed or avoided drilling wells, vaccinating children,
and rebuilding school systems in the deadly southeast.

The September edition of CARE's policy brief -- which other relief groups
follow closely -- said armed attacks on aid workers jumped from one a month
to one every two days since September 2002.

Half the country's 32 provinces -- most in the south -- are too risky to
enter. "There are all sorts of movements to keep Afghanistan unstable,"
Barker said.

Local authorities generally blame all violence on the extremist Taliban
movement toppled from power by a U.S.-led force two years ago, but a
confounding array of agendas are in play.

"It's impossible to separate out what's factional fighting, what's Taliban
activity and what's drug trafficking," said Johnston. "We haven't seen this
type of targeting (of aid workers) in the 16 years we've been here."

In March, at the height of the poppy season's spring harvest, gunmen
attacked a three-vehicle convoy at a blind curve in a rocky mountain road
near Dara Noor, a village 60 miles north of Kandahar and a prime poppy
region. The attackers killed Ricardo Munguia, a 39-year-old water engineer
from El Salvador working for the Red Cross. He was the first foreign aid
worker to die in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster.

Around a bend is a large poppy field, where men, women and children this
week happily harvested the autumn crop of the opiate-soaked bulbs that
emerge after the plants burst into a gorgeous array of flowers. They
greeted two reporters as potential customers.

Moments later, a taxi driver scolded the reporters for lingering in an area
in which a Taliban convoy had passed in recent days.

Last weekend, assailants ambushed a pickup truck in southern Afghanistan
and shot to death seven bodyguards of the governor of Helmand province, in
the Mir Mundo area 50 miles northwest of Kandahar. On Aug. 14,

The violence has grown with the poppy production in Afghanistan, which
produced 12 percent of the world's opium in 2001 and 76 percent last year.

The fact that drug trafficking revenues have soared since the U.S. push
into Afghanistan has put the Bush administration on the defensive.

"You ask what we're going to do and the answer is, 'I don't really know,"'
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said recently.

A U.S.-led force toppled the Taliban for harboring the al-Qaida extremist
group that engineered the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States. A
NATO force has focused on maintaining security in Kabul, the capital.
Humanitarian agencies want to see the force spread into the violent south
and east.

A Moscow-backed government ruled Afghanistan for a decade before Soviet
troops withdrew, leaving warlords to fight for power. The Taliban won
control of most of the country to put an end to the factional bloodletting
but then imposed a harsh form of Islamic rule.

The impact the extremist militia had on opium production is in dispute.
Though the Taliban stopped many farmers from growing the crop -- some of
whom were later killed by their financiers -- there were numerous reports
that no action was taken against people who bought, sold or stockpiled
opium, said Mohammed Amirkhizi, the Afghan representative of the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime.

Some skeptics argue the Taliban cut production to drive up heroin prices
worldwide. However, at the time the U.N. drug control office in neighboring
Pakistan said there was no evidence of stockpiling by the Taliban movement,
though some commanders might be doing it.

Amirkhizi said the country's transitional government mounted what it said
was a successful attempt to eradicate opium production last year, but
there's been no independent confirmation of results. Afghan officials in
general play down the role of opium production in the country. But the
Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban was known to have financed its
forces with drug money.

Anti-Taliban warlords in the south, with the tacit approval of the
U.S.-backed central government, last weekend sent a 220-man special
operations force on an open-ended mission to go after Taliban command posts
in Afghanistan.

The fact that such militias frequently travel in civilian vehicles and wear
robes over their camouflage fatigues has made the situation more dangerous
for civilians working for humanitarian development agencies, CARE's Barker
said.

Since the war, the protective Western military presence in Kabul has
doubled the population of the city to 3 million, said Maki Shinohara of the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. And thousands have begun returning to
homes in the relatively secure north. But few will venture to the south or
east. "There is just no law and order," she said. "It's the rule of the gun.