TERRORISM'S HARVEST

How Al-Qaeda Is Tapping Into The Opium Trade To Finance Violence And
Destabilize Afghanistan

Coalition forces on the trail of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of
the Taliban in late 2001 didn't worry much about elderly,
pious-looking men like Haji Juma Khan. A towering tribesman from the
Baluchistan desert near Pakistan, Khan was picked up that December
near Kandahar and taken into U.S. custody.

Though known to U.S. and Afghan officials as a drug trafficker, he
seemed an insignificant catch. "At the time, the Americans were only
interested in catching bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar,"
says a European counterterrorism expert in Kabul. "Juma Khan walked."

That decision has come back to haunt the U.S. and its allies in
Afghanistan. Western intelligence agencies believe Khan has become the
kingpin of a heroin-trafficking enterprise that is a principal source
of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. A Western
law-enforcement official in Kabul who is tracking Khan says agents in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, after a tip-off in May, turned up evidence
that Khan is employing a fleet of cargo ships to move Afghan heroin
out of the Pakistani port of Karachi. The official says at least three
vessels on return trips from the Middle East took arms like plastic
explosives and antitank mines, which were secretly unloaded in Karachi
and shipped overland to al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Khan is now a marked man. "He's obviously very tightly tied to the
Taliban," says Robert Charles, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. Mirwais Yasini, head of
the Afghan government's Counter-Narcotics Directorate, says, "There
are central linkages among Khan, Mullah Omar and bin Laden."

The emergence of Khan's network reflects the challenges the coalition
still faces in Afghanistan as the U.S. and its allies struggle to hunt
al-Qaeda's leaders, disarm Afghanistan's warlords and shore up
President Hamid Karzai against a revived Taliban-led insurgency. The
renewed trade in opium has worsened all those problems.

The World Bank calculates that more than half of Afghanistan's economy
is tied up in drugs.

The combined incomes of farmers and in-country traffickers reached
$2.23 billion last year--up from $1.3 billion in 2002. Heroin
trafficking has long been the main source of funds for local warlords'
private armies, which thwart Karzai's attempts to expand his authority
beyond Kabul. But the drug trade is becoming even more dangerous: U.S.
and British counterterrorism experts say al-Qaeda and its Taliban
allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales.
Antidrug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much
al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative
estimates run to tens of millions of dollars.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda don't grow the opium poppies.

Their involvement is higher up the drug chain, where profits are
fatter, and so is their cut of the deal. Yasini says the terrorists
receive a share of profits in return for supplying gunmen to protect
labs and convoys.

Recent busts have revealed evidence of al-Qaeda's ties to the
trade.

On New Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel stopped a small fishing boat in
the Arabian Sea. After a search, says a Western antinarcotics
official, "they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of
drugs." In January U.S. and Afghan agents raided a drug runner's house
in Kabul and found a dozen or so satellite phones. The phones were
passed on to the cia station in Kabul, which found that they had been
used to call numbers linked to suspected terrorists in Turkey, the
Balkans and Western Europe. And in March U.S. troops searching a
suspected terrorist hideout in Oruzgan province found opium with an
estimated street value of $15 million.

Antidrug officials say the only way to cut off al-Qaeda's pipeline is
to destroy the poppy farms.

U.S. military commanders have been reluctant to commit the nearly
20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to opium eradication, fearing that
doing so would divert attention from the hunt for terrorists. The U.S.
ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tapped top U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration official Harold Wankel to lead an
intensified drive to nail kingpins, shut down heroin-production labs,
eradicate poppy fields and persuade farmers to plant food crops.

If the drug cartels aren't stopped, the U.S. fears, they could sow
more chaos in Afghanistan--which al-Qaeda and the Taliban could
exploit to wrest back power. Miwa Kato, a Kabul-based officer for the
U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, puts it this way: "The opium problem
has the capacity to undo everything that's being done here to help the
Afghans." Few outcomes would please the coalition's enemies more.

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Elaine Shannon/Washington