Afghanistan Turns Corner:

WITH TALIBAN GONE, POPPY CULTIVATION SURGES

GHOCHAK, Afghanistan -- There is widespread doubt here that anything
resembling law and order will bloom in Afghanistan in the next six months.
There is no doubt at all that opium poppies will bloom --- in abundance.

"Everyone is planting," says Ashoqullah, a 25-year-old landowner, who uses
only one name. "In a few months, these fields will be covered in a blanket
of spectacular red-and-white flowers. We'll draw the ooze from the flower
bulbs, pack it in plastic bags or small soap cartons and sell it at the
bazaar."

As Ashoqullah licks his lips over his future bounty, farmers bend over in
fields behind him, slashing at white heads of cauliflower and yanking
fragrant spring onions from the soil. They are scurrying to harvest food
crops so they can sow poppy seeds in this village, five miles west of the
eastern city of Jalalabad.

The war against terrorism has, for the moment at least, defeated the war on
drugs in Afghanistan. The Taliban has been vanquished, and so has the ban
on cultivating opium poppies.

The prohibition, which carried a three-month jail sentence, produced a 96
percent drop in production of opium, from more than a million pounds in
1999 to 40,600 pounds this year, said the U.N. Drug Control Program. With
the demise of the puritanical Taliban, one of the world's poorest countries
now is expected to regain its standing as the world's leading producer of
opium and chief supplier of heroin to Europe.

Mirakbar, who also uses only one name, can barely suppress his glee at his
anticipated windfall. The walled, mud-brick fortress in nearby Ghani Khel
known across the region as the Opium Bazaar --- is abuzz with activity
as he and some 300 opium merchants ply their trade.

Operating in narrow smoky aisles and from wooden-door stalls equipped with
little more than a scale and a tidy pile of plastic bags, Mirakbar and the
other dealers buy the opium paste from farmers for roughly $90 a pound. In
turn, he says, they sell it to brokers for $100. The raw opium is then
shuttled by truck, mule or taxi into Pakistan, where it is processed into
heroin worth billions of dollars to users around the world.

Says the 25-year-old Mirakbar: "The Taliban may have tried to prevent
farmers from growing it, but they stockpiled it in warehouses and were
involved in trading it. The new government will be, too."

Ashoqullah says many farmers have families of 15 members and cannot survive
by raising vegetables.

The issue is strictly economic. They abhor the use of opium and other
recreational drugs, though they have in their midst some of the most
coveted opium and hashish in the world. They rarely drink alcohol or smoke
cigarettes.

When asked if farmers in a country beset by chronic hunger, malnutrition
and drought should reject the lure of poppies, Ashoqullah grows angry,
pointing to a 90-by-300-foot plot of freshly-plowed land and the mound of
the vegetables that had been cleared from it the previous day.

"If you want it, take it and put it in a truck and carry it away," he said
of the vegetables. "We don't need any more, and the farmers here can't
survive on it."