WAR ON TERROR

PAKISTAN

U.N. report backs probe of Taliban POWs' deaths

A confidential U.N. memorandum found evidence to justify a criminal
investigation into the deaths in Afghanistan of hundreds of Taliban
prisoners held by the U.S.-backed northern alliance, Newsweek reported
Sunday. Newsweek said U.N. investigators based their finding on an
investigation of a mass grave that "contains bodies of Taliban POWs who died
of suffocation" while being transferred from Kunduz to a prison at Shibergan
after Taliban resistance in northern Afghanistan collapsed in November.
Prisoners were often moved in large metal shipping containers.

The magazine said the memo referred to "political sensitivity" and
recommended a halt to "all activities relevant to this case" until a
decision was made on whether to push for a criminal trial, truth commission
or other alternatives.

Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the memo, White House Communications
Director Dan Bartlett said: "It's important that we not rush to judgment,
that we look at the facts. And as we look at those facts, the proper course
for an investigation or inquiry will be made at a later date."

AFGHANISTAN

Poppy eradication effort isn't working, U.N. says

The new Afghan government has "largely failed" in its 4-month-old effort to
eradicate the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan, U.N. crop experts reported
Sunday.

Their figures show this year's crop, close to the high levels of the late
1990s, could be worth more than $1 billion at the farm level in Afghanistan.

By the late 1990s, Afghanistan was supplying 70 percent of the world's
opium. Then, in 2000, the Taliban government banned poppy cultivation, and
U.N. and U.S. drug agencies determined that this led to an almost total
reduction in acreage devoted to the crop in the 2001 growing season.

But the war that ousted the Taliban late last year prompted Afghan farmers
to plant poppy again over tens of thousands of acres.

In April, the interim government of President Hamid Karzai announced an
eradication program. Farmers would be compensated with $500 per acre for
destroyed poppy, the government said. That's only a fraction of the
estimated $6,400 per acre of gross income a farmer can earn on poppy,
according to the report.