BUSH EASES AFGHAN ISOLATION

UNITED NATIONS -- In a first cautious step toward reducing the near-total
isolation of the Taliban, the Bush administration has sent two U.S.
narcotics experts to Afghanistan as part of an international team assessing
how to help farmers who have ended opium poppy cultivation, U.N. officials
said yesterday.

Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed that he had approved the trip in
a letter last week to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Although the
experts have no plans to meet the top leadership of the Taliban, they will
meet with farmers and local officials.

U.N. narcotics officials reported earlier this year that it appeared that
the Taliban, a militant Islamic group that controls most of Afghanistan,
had all but wiped out poppy crops under a ban announced last year. U.S.
drug experts have begun their own survey and expect to have final results
by early summer.

Until this year, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, the
source of much of the heroin sold in Europe.

The U.N. Drug Control Program had met resistance from the Clinton
administration to any projects to assist Afghans in a drug-eradication program.

U.S. policy had been to isolate the Taliban and punish them through U.N.
sanctions because of their refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden, the
Saudi-born Islamic militant wanted in connection with bombings of two U.S.
Embassies in Africa. The United States may now have a less rigid policy.

"The United States is prepared to fund a United Nations International Drug
Control Program proposal in Afghanistan to assist former poppy cultivators
hard hit by the ban," Powell wrote to Annan on April 16. "However, we want
to ensure that assistance benefits the farmers, not the factions, while it
also curbs the Afghan drug trade."