HEROIN LIKELY AIDING TALIBAN EFFORT

Drug Trade Provides Afghan Rulers With Funds, Corrupts Their Enemies

QUETTA, Pakistan -- Under a gray moon dimmed by fog and exhaust pollution,
small clumps of heroin users sag against Muslim tombstones or sprawl across
unmarked graves at a walled cemetery where this city's addict population
has been sequestered by police.

One man, sickened by a miscalculated dose, retches loudly, the sound
mingling with the howling of feral dogs. Others not yet dazed by the pure
narcotics available go through the rituals of preparing the grainy powder
to smoke or inject while huddled under filthy blankets.

Times are harder than usual for the junkies here just a few miles from the
Afghan border. The price of heroin has more than tripled since the
beginning of the year, from 15 rupees, or about 25 cents, to 50 rupees for
one dose.

"The Taliban did not allow the poppies to be grown this year," says
Abdullah, a 32-year-old Afghan refugee. Others see a different cause. "The
bombing is giving the Taliban too much trouble, so the heroin is not coming
from there so much," says Asad Dhul, another Afghan who has found a
community of sorts in a small cave at one end of the acres-long cemetery.

The inflated heroin prices are typical of many parts of the world, experts
say. And, as the Quetta heroin users suspect, actions by Afghanistan's
ruling Taliban militia have influenced the price of the drug, said United
States and United Nations officials.

But the story of the Taliban's role in controlling the world's heroin
supply, and therefore the global price, is a lot more complicated than it
may first appear, high-ranking U.S. law enforcement officials say.

"Reports we're getting indicate that despite the bombing and the military
action, heroin continues to flow out of Afghanistan," Drug Enforcement
Administrator Asa Hutchinson said last week. "There has been no
diminishment of that, even though there has been a price fluctuation."

While some heroin comes from the zone controlled by the Northern Alliance
forces, the vast majority is produced in areas governed by the Taliban,
U.S. officials say.

Weeks of bombing and a U.S.-led effort to seize international financial
assets of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network are
starting to create cash-flow problems, the officials say. The quickest
solution is heroin-generated cash.

Ironically, if the Taliban are profiting from higher drug prices now in
their moment of financial need, a decision made by the Islamic
fundamentalist regime a year ago on either religious grounds or as a shrewd
business calculation likely caused the price increase, experts say.

In July 2000, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued a decree
banning the production of opium and heroin. Prices of the drugs soared
almost immediately and have remained high.

Anti-drug officials say recent intelligence has indicated that opium
growers who answer to the Taliban have been emptying warehouses and pushing
large shipments toward Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Most of the heroin moves across Afghanistan's long border with Pakistan
into places like this frontier city where Taliban support runs high,
officials say. Some shipments are smuggled through Quetta's airport and bus
station to the rest of Pakistan. At the port at Karachi, the narcotics are
shipped out to cities all over the world, officials said.

The goal is to create cash for the war effort with the United States, some
officials say.

"DEA possesses credible source information indicating ties between the drug
trade and the Taliban," Hutchinson said. "The Taliban derive a significant
amount of income from the opiate trade."

Some experts believe that the Taliban regime has a dual motive for pushing
the drug trade now that it is at war with a U.S.-led coalition.

For the Taliban and al-Qaida, narcotics are the best possible weapon, said
Rachel Ehrenfeld of the Center for the Study of Corruption. "They generate
funds while corrupting the moral fiber of the enemy," he said.

In congressional testimony earlier this year, CIA Director George Tenet
agreed. "Some Islamic extremists view drug trafficking as a weapon against
the West and a source of revenue to fund their operations," he said.

Taliban supporters dispute the connection with the drug trade. Here in
Pakistan's Baluchistan province, where sympathy for the Taliban runs high,
people point to a decree issued by the Taliban banning opium production as
proof that the regime sought to purge the centuries-old opium trade from
the country.

A local government official who agreed to be interviewed on the condition
that his name not be used said, "The Taliban told the world it would stop
the heroin growing there, and that is what happened." Asked about the
addict population at the graveyard, he said, "That is two or three thousand
out of (Quetta's) 1 million people. It is nothing."

Even heroin addicts in Pakistan, including Afghan refugees, say their
experience is that the Taliban do not tolerate narcotics now. "There was
nothing there; no heroin could be found," said Abdul Salaam, 33, who
confessed that he migrated to Pakistan from the Kandahar area earlier this
year in search of drugs. "Over there, you could only find poppy petals to
chew," he said.

But U.S. and U.N. anti-drug intelligence reports said any notion that the
Taliban's motto on drug use is "Just say no" is spurious.

The U.N. Drug Control Policy office in Vienna, Austria, recently released a
paper on Taliban anti-drug efforts in the late 1990s that observed, "There
were no verified instances in which narcotics or precursor chemicals were
seized or destroyed (by the Taliban). There were no reports that drug
traffickers or local drug dealers were arrested or prosecuted. And there
(was) no verified destruction of morphine or heroin laboratories."

The Taliban have controlled much of the world's heroin supply since taking
power in 1996. Afghan farmers grow acres of red poppies that yield the
opium gum easily converted to heroin, and they produce about 70 percent of
the drug consumed worldwide. While most U.S. heroin starts as poppies in
Mexico and South America, a significant portion of Pakistan's supply comes
from Afghanistan.

In the first four years of Taliban rule, the amount of opium production in
the country nearly doubled, reaching an all-time peak of 3,700 metric tons
in 2000, according to figures compiled by the U.N. Drug Control Policy
office. U.S. officials say the Taliban took a cut of the profits by taxing
poppy growers. Bin Laden's al-Qaida fighters got paid for providing
security for drug shipments, some Western intelligence agencies believe.

Hutchinson was more cautious about bin Laden's involvement but said the
Saudi exile at least indirectly had benefited from narcotics trafficking.

"Although DEA has no direct evidence to confirm that bin Laden is involved
in the drug trade, the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden is
believed to have flourished in large part due to the Taliban's reliance on
the drug trade for organizational revenue," he said.

When Omar ordered opium production halted, the decree had a startling
effect. Opium production fell from an all-time peak to almost zero within
months.

But Western experts were cynical about that decree from the start, seeing
it as more of a marketing ploy than a result of religious conviction.

"At the time the Taliban instituted its ban, our information was that the
value of existing heroin in Afghanistan was at an all-time low," Bradley
Hittle of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said in a
recent interview.

After the ban went into effect, the price of heroin shot up almost
immediately worldwide, and the effect is still being felt by addicts from
Quetta's graveyard to Houston.

U.S. officials say the Taliban knew that enormous supplies of narcotics
remained in warehouses in Afghanistan and that the flow of opium and heroin
out of Afghanistan did not slow much, if any. But prices soared, adding to
the wealth of the Taliban.

The DEA has long recognized Pakistan's key position as a transit point for
Afghan heroin and has tried to help create an anti-drug force here.

Pakistani officials involved in fighting drugs declined to be interviewed
for the record last week, saying permission to talk must be cleared in the
capital of Islamabad. Requests for an interview with officials there were
ignored.

Junkies clustered in the Quetta graveyard say the local authorities leave
them alone as long as they stay put. Whether the setting designated by the
police for the Pakistan version of Needle Park was intended with grim
humor, the joke did not seem to register with those in various states of
stupor from heroin ingestion.

"I'd like to quit, but it is difficult here. There is no place to go for
treatment," Abdullah said as he shivered violently, from either the drugs
coursing through his blood or a cutting November wind that portended a long
winter.

Instead, he has become part of the community here that has constructed
crude living spaces in the caves, maximizing the time that can be spent
inside the earthen walls of the graveyard.

If treatment options are few, drug enforcement efforts in Pakistan have
received a boost from the United States.

Hutchinson said the DEA has helped train an effective anti-drug force in
Pakistan. "These are veteran units -- highly sensitive, motivated
investigative units," he said. "They are trained at our DEA facility at
Quantico (Va.), where they undergo polygraph examination and are tested to
be drug-free and as free of corruption as we can determine."

That model may soon be applied in countries on Afghanistan's northern
border, he said.

"We want to continue this and develop similar programs in other Central
Asian countries," he said. "The international effort that surrounds
Afghanistan is critical to addressing the heroin addiction problem in the
long term."

Chronicle reporters John C. Henry and Patty Reinert contributed to this
report from Washington.