JOINING WITH THE TALIBAN IN A NEW WAR ON DRUGS

By Raymond Bonner

ASHKARGAH, Afghanistan This grim, remote town is the capital of Helmand
province, the opiumgrowing capital of the world.

Once dubbed Little America because of all the aid workers here, the
province is now controlled by the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist
movement that forces men to grow beards and women to stay at home,
amputates the hands of thieves, and strips tape from cassettes because
music is considered evil.

The Taliban has been widely condemned for autocratic conduct and has been
accused of providing a safe haven, and training camps, for terrorists.

But last week, the new head of the United Nations' drugcontrol agency sat
down with Taliban leaders and offered them economic assistance. The reason:
the group's religious strictures ban drugs of any kind, and it has declared
its intention to stamp out the cultivation of opium poppy, the base for
heroin.

Western democracies, which got into bed with unsavory regimes to fight
communism, are now finding allies who are rather unpleasant and
unreliable in the war on drugs.

The United Nations and its top drug fighter, Pino Arlacchi, need the
Taliban to meet a publicly declared goal of eliminating drugs around the
world within a decade.

No one doubts that Arlacchi's vision is audacious. But this serious,
energetic Italian academicturnedpolitician has been asked if he is not
also naive. After all, more drug battles have been lost than won. Latin
America, for example, is littered with the remains of wellintentioned
projects to wean peasants off growing coca.

Unlike their cocagrowing counterparts in Latin America, however, Afghan
farmers do not have a long history of harvesting poppy. Twentyfive years
ago, poppy production here was 200 tons; last year, it was 2,800 tons.

So Arlacchi is convinced he can succeed. Twenty years ago, he noted, opium
was grown in just about every country across Asia, from Turkey to Thailand.
Now, he said, the war can be concentrated on just two countries,
Afghanistan and Burma; together they account for 90 percent of the world's
opium supply.

Arlacchi has begun here, where the Taliban's militancy works in his favor.
The Taliban's religious fervor clashes, however, with a secular reality
opium poppy has been a major source of their income. And there is
widespread skepticism among U.S. officials and United Nations diplomats
over which will win out.

But even the skeptics think it is worth testing the Taliban, which controls
90 percent of the poppygrowing areas of the country.

Western governments will also be tested because the poppyeradication
project is going to cost at least $25 million a year for 10 years in
Afghanistan. For at the core of Arlacchi's program are alternative
development projects. Give farmers the means to grow crops other than
poppy, the theory goes, and they will become lawabiding citizens.

Will Congress contribute America's share for a United Nations project? With
the money going to the Taliban, liberal human rights activists might unite
with conservatives to oppose the spending. Anticipating problems, Arlacchi
is assembling what he calls a "council of wise men," prominent world
leaders from government, industry and the arts, to help him raise money.

It was only after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that amber
fields of grain gave way to bright fields of poppy.

As the country sank into war, everything fell into disrepair, from tractors
to irrigation systems; fertilizer and seeds have been hard to come by. So
farmers turned from wheat, melons, cotton and their traditional crops to
poppy, which is labor intensive but yields more dollars per acre than
traditional crops.

Last year, for example, a 60yearold local farmer named Agha Mohammad
planted 14.5 acres in poppy. For his harvest, he was paid $7,920 by drug
smugglers. So this year, he is planting three more acres, he explained last
week as three of his small sons chased away birds trying to feast on the
newly sown poppy seeds.

Mohammad, who has a long snow white beard, is a tenant farmer. The land
owner, Hazad Mohammad, said he took in $16,528 last year from growing poppy.

In a country where the per capita income is $100 a year, it is not easy to
imagine that these men would give up this revenue source. But both men
insisted they would.

"We are only growing opium to support our families," said Mohammad, whose
family numbers 23. "If we can be assured of irrigation water, we'll
cultivate the crops we did before the war."

On the edge of the field is a small canal. It is a channel of the Boghra
irrigation system, which was built in the 1960s with U.S. aid money. It is
an impressive project.

Stretching for 40 miles through flat, desert land, the main canal passes
low, thick mudwalled houses set among orchards and small vegetable plots.
Green shoots sprout in the plots that get water; camels and donkeys wander
in the fields.

Before the war, the canal's waters irrigated 61,000 acres, making this
region the bread basket of Afghanistan. Now the canal is filled with 15
years of silt, and most of the watercontrol gates are rusted.

The irrigation system can be repaired so that farmers can again grow wheat,
onions, and apples. But then drug traffickers will still be able to offer
the farmers two or three times as much for poppy.

"That's why we need incentives and sanctions," Arlacchi said, as he walked
from Mohammad's poppy field.

The incentives will come from the West, in the form of development aid. The
sanctions will be applied by the Taliban, of course. Authoritarian
enforcement may be distasteful to the West. So were many of the dictators
Washington dealt with during the Cold War.