AFGHAN ALLIES' HEROIN HABIT A DILEMMA FOR U.S.

Officials Say Northern Alliance Warlords Up to Old Tricks

Imam Sahib, Afghanistan -- Somewhere in the dusty, noisy guts of this
northern Afghan city, a secret lab is "doing the works of white powder."

That's what they call heroin production in Imam Sahib, home to one of the
most notorious of Afghanistan's estimated 417 drug laboratories.

Here, workers turn opium resin extracted from dried poppy seedpods into
fine white dust that then travels to the boisterous bazaars of Tajikistan
and Turkmenistan and beyond, to the streets of Russia, Europe and the
United States. Drug-control officials in Tajikistan estimate that the Imam
Sahib lab can produce up to 75 pounds of the narcotic a day.

That is not the image Gul Mohammat, the governor of Imam Sahib, wants for
his town: "There are no drug laboratories here." And Abdul Kayum, the
police chief, declared, "The drug problem was very grave during the Taliban
period. But the Taliban is gone, and this business has been eliminated."

Despite such avowals, international drug-control experts say that heroin
production actually has increased in Afghanistan since the demise of the
Taliban -- a potential problem for the U.S. effort to root out terrorism
here, because drug smuggling traditionally has been a main source of income
for terrorist groups.

In 1999, the Taliban had imposed a two-year ban on poppy cultivation and
heroin production. The militia said the opium trade was "un- Islamic,"
although some Western experts believed the Taliban was trying to hike opium
prices.

Whatever the case, after a brief hiatus in which the Taliban fought for the
region against the Northern Alliance, the Imam Sahib lab and others like it
are working full-time again, said Antonella Deledda, the regional
representative of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

"There has been a disruption of networks and facilities of drug-
trafficking in Afghanistan, but they are being restructured now," said
Deledda, who is based in Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan.

Since Imam Sahib fell into the hands of U.S.-backed forces last fall, the
drug lab has been consistently stamping white cotton two-pound heroin bags
marked with the telltale scorpion-shaped insignia.

These bags travel along what is known as the "Great Drug Route" to Europe,
said Maj. Avaz Yuldashev, a spokesman for Tajikistan's Drug Control Agency.
He keeps a few of the bags in a shabby brown suitcase in his office in
Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital, and readily shows them to journalists. Imam
Sahib, the signs on the bags say in Afghan Dari, "Quality Guaranteed."

And as the bags go from place to place, their value increases dramatically.
A pound of heroin -- processed from 10 pounds of opium -- costing $300 in
Afghanistan fetches up to $30,000 by the time it reaches Europe.

U.N. drug-control experts expect between 2,000 and 2,700 tons of Afghan
opium to enter the market this year, up from 185 tons in 2001. At the peak
of its opium production in 1999, Afghanistan produced 4,565 tons of opium,
or about 75 percent of the world's -- and 15 percent of America's -- supply.

Although they refuse to implicate anyone directly, drug-control officials
accuse former Northern Alliance commanders -- America's allies in the war
against the Taliban -- of running the drug business.

"These drug labs are controlled by certain provincial leaders, warlords and
commanders," said Gen. Rustam Nazarov, head of the Drug Control Agency of
Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic and the major transit
country for drug smuggling out of Afghanistan. Asked point-blank about
allegations relating to specific officials in Northern Afghanistan, Nazarov
smiled slyly. "We know their names," he answered.

A Western drug-control official, who asked not to be named, was more direct.

Every warlord, every governor in northern Afghanistan has a hand in the
business, the official said.

The involvement in drug trade of the very people who for the last year have
been helping America chase down al Qaeda and Taliban operatives inside
Afghanistan could put the United States in a quandary.

In fact, Nazarov said the U.S.-led war against terror will fall short if
the problem of heroin and opium trafficking from Afghanistan is not addressed.

"Members of the anti-Taliban coalition say that they fight against
terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and that, unfortunately, fighting
drugs is not a priority," Nazarov said. "This is unfortunate, because I
know that terrorism and the drug trade are two parts of one evil."

An American official in Dushanbe said that although the United States
encourages fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan "because of the sense of
lawlessness it creates," it plans to address the issue only "in the long term."

"Our immediate concern in the region has been the anti-terror effort," the
official said.

When he took office this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced a
ban on opium cultivation and has made repeated pleas to Afghan farmers not
to plant poppies again.

During April's poppy harvest season, the interim government spent $67
million in international aid to compensate opium farmers who were willing
to destroy their crops. But the rewards -- onetime contributions of $300
per acre -- were paltry compared to the $1,000 an acre that poppy seedpods
yield, and many farmers opted to keep their crops. The U.N. drug-control
program estimates that there are still between 111,000 and 160,000 acres of
poppy fields in Afghanistan.

Drug-control experts say the involvement in drug trafficking of Afghan
government officials also hinders the effort to rid the country of the drug
problem.

"The trade will not disappear, given that people in the current Afghan
administration continue to profit from it," said Tamara Makarenko, an
expert on the Central Asian drug trade at the University of Glamorgan in Wales.

Experts say not just Afghan officials are involved in the lucrative,
illicit business. Yuldashev, the Tajik drug-control agency spokesman,
hinted that the 10,000 Russian border guards who patrol the 682-mile
Tajik-Afghan frontier might be part of the smuggling chain.

"Why not? The temptation is great," Yuldashev said.

The Russian border guards deny this accusation, saying they are on the
front line of the war against the Afghan drug runners. Lt. Col. Pyotr
Gordiyenko, a spokesman for Russian border guards in Dushanbe, said the
border guards routinely trade gunfire with the smugglers. In September, the
border guards shot and killed a drug smuggler attempting to cross from
Afghanistan into Tajikistan with 35 pounds of heroin.

"The war is over, but not for us," Gordiyenko said.

Sitting on an expensive Persian carpet in the house of the governor of Imam
Sahib, a local border commander offered his own reflections on the "works
of white powder."

"The Tajik border is very well guarded; they have mines, soldiers every 50
yards," explained Rommel, commander of 2,000 Afghan border guards who
patrol a 192-mile stretch of the Afghan-Tajik border. "If the drug runners
don't have connections with the Tajik border guards, they can't go through.

"But if they have connections here and in Tajikistan," he continued, "then
all doors are open for them. This is joint smuggling. Everyone is involved."

Looking up, Rommel suddenly caught himself. "All I can tell you is that all
the people here are against smuggling."