THE OTHER WAR: LONG BEFORE THE BOMBING BEGAN, TALIBAN OUTLAWED OPIUM CROPS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - In a dusty, mite-infested crawl space underneath
Peshawar's Jail Bridge, the hot topic of conversation was supply-and-demand
economics as Riad Ali and three fellow addicts prepared their Sunday
afternoon fix of heroin.

"It's getting very expensive. Last year, I paid 20 rupees for a gram. Now
I'm paying 250," Mr. Ali, 26, said while flicking his cigarette lighter
under a piece of foil holding a droplet of heroin. Like many addicts in
Pakistan, he smokes the drug rather than injects it the way American
junkies often do.

It could be time to get help, Mr. Ali said, because the price of addiction
is almost too high to bear.

With that, he put his finger on a problem that is perplexing international
counternarcotics officials: As much as the United States is trying to
portray Afghanistan's Taliban leadership as the archenemy in the war on
terrorism, the Taliban may have been the West's best friend in the war on
drugs.

All of that might have changed with the initiation of hostilities between
the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition after the Sept. 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The rising price of heroin is the direct result of a 94 percent decline in
Afghanistan's production of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, said
Barnard Frahi, program director for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the U.N.
Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

As recently as last year, Afghanistan was the biggest source of opium in
the world, producing 3,275 metric tons of opium, according to U.N. estimates.

Those supplies have now been choked off - not because of the current U.S.
bombardment of Afghanistan, but because the Taliban issued a religious
decree long before the bombing began.

In 1999, the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, declared opium
production to be un-Islamic and therefore banned it. Most of the nation's
devoutly Muslim population abided by the decree in much the same way that
Afghans accepted bans on women in the workplace, girls attending school, or
other restrictions whose violation could result in harsh punishment, even
death.

Potential setback huge

Now, international counternarcotics officials warn, Afghanistan's opium
crop could come back with a flourish next year with the heavy U.S.
bombardment and breakdown in Taliban control. Such a setback in one of the
world's premier manual-eradication programs would be huge, they say.

"Today, of course, it is politically incorrect to say the Taliban did
something right," Mr. Frahi said. "But, for the first time, we have seen a
drop of 3,000 tons in opium production in Afghanistan."

He attributed the drop almost entirely to Taliban efforts to enforce its
1999 eradication decree.

It takes roughly 10 tons of opium to make one ton of heroin, meaning the
Taliban eradication removed about 300 tons of heroin from the world market.

Ironically, the opposition Northern Alliance, which controls only 10
percent of Afghan territory, is known to control most of the nation's
surviving opium trade. The United Nations estimates that 50 tons of opium
are now being produced in Taliban-held areas, compared with 150 tons from
areas under Northern Alliance control.

"Opium poppy is effectively eliminated in those parts of Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan where it has been cultivated in recent years," said a U.N. Drug
Control Program report prepared by a 12-member team of inspectors who
fanned out across the country earlier this year.

The amount eradicated under the Taliban decree amounts to seven times the
opium seized around the world last year. In 2000, Afghanistan accounted for
75 percent of the world's opium production. Today, as a result of the
eradication effort, its share of world production equals only 10 percent,
according to U.N. estimates.

The U.S. State Department remains skeptical. In a report issued earlier
this month, it acknowledged some reduction in the amount of acreage under
cultivation in Taliban-controlled areas but said the Kabul government never
ordered the nation's vast stockpiles of already-harvested opium to be
destroyed.

The result, the State Department said, is that the Taliban continued to tax
the sale of the nation's opium stockpiles and "presumably benefited
substantially from resulting price increases."

The U.S. report also said the Taliban may have reversed itself and
authorized new cultivation of opium in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Although the Taliban deserves credit for what it accomplished before the
war began, Mr. Frahi said, the question of stockpiles warrants more
international scrutiny.

"We know the Taliban is keeping stockpiles," he said. "But we don't know
what the mullahs do with it. Do they keep it in kind? Do they convert it to
cash?"

Afghans, who have cultivated opium for the last four decades, have widely
adopted the drug as a form of currency within their nation, according to
various studies. Opium is accepted as payment for purchases in stores or
for services rendered. A farmer can buy on credit based on his anticipated
opium harvest in the coming season. Instead of saving cash, many Afghans
save dried opium in their homes.

"Opium poppy has played an increasingly important role in the livelihood
strategies of rural communities in Afghanistan. As a nonperishable,
low-weight, high-value product, opium is ideally suited to the war-damaged
physical infrastructure of Afghanistan," the U.N. drug report stated.

The Taliban decree essentially cut off two-thirds of the income for
Afghanistan's rural population. Because farmers had no time to replace
their opium crops with other cash and food crops, the nation's food stocks
rapidly diminished. War between the Taliban and Northern Alliance added to
the problem.

Today, up to 6 million Afghans are in danger of starvation because of the
resulting famine conditions across the country that existed long before the
U.S. bombing campaign began.

Mr. Frahi said that cash-poor Afghans are swarming toward the borders of
Pakistan and Iran, dumping their stockpiles of opium on smuggling markets
to obtain quick cash. The Taliban is probably doing the same with its
stockpiles. As a result, drug use in neighboring countries is skyrocketing,
he added.

Pakistan and Iran are believed to have 1 million heroin addicts, according
to U.N. estimates.

Before the Taliban began enforcing its opium-cultivation ban, a pound of
opium was selling at around $40. In August, as opium crops virtually
disappeared from the country, the price had skyrocketed to nearly $300 per
pound. Today, Mr. Frahi said, the price is back down to around $40 because
so many opium stockpiles are being dumped on the market.

No bargain for addicts

The savings have yet to be passed on to the consumer, much to the
consternation of Mr. Ali and his friends. With the Pakistani rupee now
exchanging at a rate of 61 to the dollar, he needs more than $4.50 a day to
buy food and pay for heroin.

A few days ago, his brother, Inam Ullah, passed out next to the railroad
tracks under the Jail Bridge after smoking a fix of heroin. He lost two
toes to a train and now has a badly mangled foot that appears to be
gangrenous. With money so tight, medical care is going to have to wait, the
brothers said.

"I'm begging on the street. I go out and collect garbage to scavenge for
scrap," Mr. Ali said. "It wasn't so hard when we needed 20 rupees a day.
But nobody can come up with 250. It can't be done."