U.S. SAYS TALIBAN REVERSING BAN ON OPIUM POPPY FARMS

Regime May Use Drug Taxes To Finance War

Washington -- The State Department charged yesterday that farmers in
territory controlled by Afghanistan's Taliban are again growing opium poppy
plants, helping the regime finance its war through the drug trade.

Production of opium would be a reversal of a policy under which the Islamic
fundamentalist regime said such cultivation was anti-Muslim.

Last year, the Taliban issued a ban on the cultivation of opium poppies,
from which heroin is refined. But the U.S. government and others have
alleged the Taliban were profiting from sales of stockpiled opium, perhaps
by up to $30 million a year.

Yesterday, a State Department spokesman said the Taliban might be trying to
finance their war with the United States by taxing new opium cultivation.

"Our information now is that U.N. drug control officers in Pakistan have
detected signs that Afghan farmers in Taliban areas have begun planting
opium poppy again," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. The
poppies are planted in the fall and harvested in the spring.

"We'll keep following that to see if it means that this trade, this benefit
to the Taliban, will resume and expand," Boucher added.

The United Nations and other agencies have reported in the past year that
Afghanistan, which was said to supply about 75 percent of the world's
opium, had cut its production sharply under the Taliban's edict.
Afghanistan accounts for only about 6 percent of the heroin entering the
United States, which is supplied mostly by Mexican and South American
traffickers, but 95 percent of Britain's heroin comes from Afghan opium,
according to federal statistics.

Boucher maintained the Taliban didn't force Afghans out of the opium trade.

"We've said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade because there
have been stocks that are still traded, and the Taliban has benefited from
that trade," Boucher said.

Just this week, regime leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was quoted by the Afghan
Islamic Press, a news agency close to the Taliban, as telling Afghans that
the edict against planting poppies was still in force.

The opposition Northern Alliance, which is now getting U.S. support, also
has been accused of using opium sales to make money.

"Right now, the opium is coming out of Afghanistan in almost a semi-
flood," said Asa Hutchinson, the new head of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration, in congressional testimony last week.

He said in addition to Afghans selling their stockpiles before they flee,
others are taking opium with them as they become refugees.

At another hearing earlier this month, Hutchinson said the Taliban regime
"exercises nearly total control" over opium production. Neither the United
States nor the United Nations has agents on the ground in Afghanistan, so
it is impossible to verify whether opium poppies, which thrive in the
country's parched climate, are being planted again.

The U.N. and the United States have narcotics agents based in Islamabad,
Pakistan, whose methods of gathering information include questioning
refugees leaving Afghanistan.

"Without curtailing the heroin trade, you cannot succeed in Afghanistan,"
Hutchinson said.

At one hearing, Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., suggested the U.S. bombing
campaign in Afghanistan zero in on the drug trade. "It seems that these
warehouses used to store this heroin would be a likely target. If we bombed
those facilities that hits them in the pocketbook," he said.

The Pentagon has never mentioned any air attacks on such drug warehouses,
if they even exist.