DRUGS FUEL TERROR CAMPAIGN

Opium Trade Keeps Taliban In Business, Experts Charge

An important battle in the U.S.-led war on terrorism will be combatting a
lucrative heroin trade that supports key terrorist groups.

Cutting that opium lifeline will require an intensive campaign aimed not
only at the terrorists, experts say, but also at criminal organizations in
Central Asia and Eastern Europe that are closely allied with them.

The principal source of most of the world's opium is Afghanistan, the
fundamentalist Islamic stronghold that shelters Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda,
the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

But Afghanistan is not the only Central Asian state overflowing with drugs.
Between 1993 and this year, Russian security services on the Tajik-Afghan
border seized 10 tons of opium and heroin, of which about 2 metric tons
were pure heroin -- enough to give every U.S. resident a dose and still
have 114 million hits left over.

The Russian government says that in Tajikistan and other Central Asian
republics, drug trafficking has become a primary source of funds for
Islamic resistance groups.

Opium is a major income source for Afghanistan's cash-strapped Taliban
government, which has been receiving $20 million to $25 million a year from
a tax on poppy production, according to Charles Diaz, a drug policy
consultant to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

The U.S. State Department says the opium tax is used to support a panoply
of fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations that train or are based
in Afghanistan.

Diaz told The Chronicle that the Taliban protect opium production and
smuggling routes and also have direct, hands-on involvement in drug
trafficking because "instead of getting paid in cash, they get paid in
product, which is the drug itself.

"Of course, they can't just sit on the heroin," Diaz said. "They have to
get rid of it by converting it to something they can use, such as money,
arms or some other material." That means the Taliban must sell some of
Afghanistan's drugs, he said.

TIES TO DRUG TRADE FEARED

Some experts suspect that bin Laden's al Qaeda network -- and other
Afghan-based terrorist organizations such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the
Army of Mohammed and the Army of the Righteous -- may also be directly
involved in the drug trade.

"It seems quite likely that al Qaeda and Islamic opposition groups in the
Central Asian republics may be involved in trafficking and possibly
refining," said Alison Jamieson, a specialist on transnational crime and a
former consultant to the U.N.'s global drug control program.

Bin Laden considers heroin a weapon in his holy war. Diaz notes that he
"has talked about going after the West by coming up with a new, more potent
strain of heroin and getting it into Europe or the United States to
undermine them."

Although direct evidence of drug trafficking by al Qaeda is scant, there is
little question that bin Laden's network has opened its bases to terrorists
and insurgents with documented ties to the heroin trade.

One of these groups is the Kosovo Liberation Army, which engaged in
bombings during its war against Yugoslav government forces in the Balkans.
It has been identified as a heroin trafficker by law enforcement agencies
and intelligence services.

The KLA includes Islamic extremists who have trained in al Qaeda camps
inside Afghanistan, U.S. and foreign intelligence services say.

Another drug-dealing terror organization connected to bin Laden is the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

"According to some estimations, IMU may be responsible for 70 percent of
the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the (Central Asian)
area," German Interpol official Ralf Mutschke told the House Judiciary
Committee last December.

Law enforcement sources say heroin-dealing Islamic radicals allied with bin
Laden in Chechnya have ties to the Chechen Mafia, part of the Russian
underworld that operates in 29 countries, including the United States.

MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL ALLIANCE

The Kosovo, Uzbek and Chechen connections point to an ominous fact: The
drug trade results in alliances of convenience between Islamic terrorists
and organized crime groups in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Whether the
militants smuggle drugs themselves or simply "tax" the drug syndicates that
operate in their areas, the result is a mutually beneficial alliance.

The organized crime connections of bin Laden allies such as the KLA and the
Chechen insurgents is troubling, said James Phillips, a research fellow
specializing in international relations for the conservative Heritage
Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"The Chechen Mafia is known to deal in all kinds of Russian contraband,
including guns, nuclear materials and chemical and biological weapons,"
Phillips said. "Bin Laden has made it clear he would like nothing more than
to have those kinds of weapons to use against the West."

To cut off the heroin lifeline to Central Asian terrorists, experts say,
two things are required. One is to aggressively pursue the entire network
involved in the trafficking, including terrorists, criminal organizations
and host governments such as the Taliban that offer them a haven.

"You have to drain the swamp to get rid of the alligators, and that means
you can't simply go after bin Laden," Phillips said. "You have to eliminate
the Taliban, an administration that is willing to export drugs and terror
and that is willing to stand by and let others do it."

However, even eliminating the Taliban may not be enough to stop the Afghan
heroin trade. The largest group fighting the Taliban for control of
Afghanistan -- and a likely member of any replacement coalition government
there -- is the Northern Alliance, which itself sells heroin to support its
insurgency.

As a consequence, the second necessity is to attack the economic conditions
that make dealing drugs such an attractive economic option to farmers in
some of the poorest areas in the world.

U.S. PAID TALIBAN TO FIGHT DRUGS

To date, such efforts have had mixed success. For example, the United
States gave $43 million to the Taliban this year to support drug
eradication in return for a Taliban pledge to eliminate Afghanistan's
massive opium crop.

U.N observers say the Taliban followed through on their pledge by virtually
wiping out opium production in the parts of Afghanistan they control. But
U.S. officials say the ban had little effect on trafficking because the
Taliban didn't eliminate big opium stockpiles from previous years or stop
traffickers.

At a briefing for the House Government Reform subcommittee on drugs
yesterday, U.S. drug officials said the Taliban now appear to be dumping
those stockpiles on the market, and the price of heroin in Europe dropped
from $746 a kilogram to $95 immediately after the U.S. terror attacks.

The subcommittee's chairman, Mark Souder, R-Ind., called the Taliban's
opium cultivation prohibition "a coldly calculated ploy to control the
world market price for their opium and heroin."