DEADLY HARVEST: THE OPIUM TRADE MAKES A COMEBACK

ON the streets into Faizabad, the provincial capital of Badakshan province,
there is a large hand-painted sign: "Production, sale and use of opium is
strongly forbidden by Islam."

Travelling through Afghanistan at this time of year, you would be hard
pressed to believe it. Last week as I crossed Takher province, field after
field of the delicate pink flowers were in full bloom, their deadly sap
being lanced from the long-stemmed green bulbs by an army of farmers.

Mahmoud Yusef is typical of many. A genial elderly man with long, grey
sideburns and beard, and wearing a woollen bobble hat, he more resembles
the cartoon image of Santa's little helper than the cultivator and salesman
of the opium resin that contributes to Afghanistan's renewed claim to fame
as the world's number-one heroin producer.

"This is only my first year, I've never grown poppy before," he assures me
as his fingers nimbly draw the wooden lancing tool quickly across the bulb.
For now, just a trickle of brown, sticky sap oozes out. Once dried in a day
or two, however, it will be scraped into buckets, ready to be sold in the
bazaar to middlemen and smugglers.

Asked how much money he gets for this first yield, Mahmoud is cagey.

"I'm only a poor man, I don't even own this land," he insists.

He says that for about five kilograms of opium, he gets 4000 to 5000
Afghanis, about UKP65. And no, he is not sure where the opium ends up or
what it is used for.

Afghanistan might be heading for its first free and fair elections,
according to the United States, but its drug trade is growing so quickly
that some fear the country could become a narco-state ruled by drugs
barons, not the government.

The 2004 White House National Drug Control Strategy reports that after a
two-year lapse, Afghanistan is again "the world's largest cultivator and
producer" of opium and heroin. The province of Helmand alone is said to
account for 75% of that output. In 2003 Afghan crops were more than double
the 2002 crop, and this year's yield is expected to be even higher.

"Just as the Bush administration's Iraqi mission has been damaged by the
scandal of prisoner abuse and other failures," the US anti-terror policy in
Afghanistan "has been undercut by the rebirth of the Afghan poppy, the main
ingredient in heroin", says Robert Weiner, a former spokesman for the
United States Office of National Drug Policy and the US House Narcotics
Committee.

He adds: "While the administration has made inroads into eradicating
Colombian coca fields and is attacking Colombia's heroin as well, it has
dangerously ignored Afghanistan's poppy problem."

Many Afghan local government politicians are equally bemused by the mixed
messages coming from the central government, and from religious leaders.

In some eastern provinces - where poppy cultivation is well established -
it is claimed that Friday prayer leaders have been telling worshippers that
it' s legal to grow opium, but not legal to use it.

Many say that such confusion is nothing new, and stems from the likes of
past policies of the British government, which is leading international
efforts to combat Afghan drugs. Initially, it tried offering farmers money
to destroy their poppy crops. But as word spread, many grew the crop
deliberately, expecting the British cash.

"When it did not come, they harvested the opium, so it made things far
worse," says General Daud, the commander of the militia force known as the
6th Corps, and the real power in one of the big producing areas of Kunduz
and Takher provinces.

The confusion about Afghan government policy continues.

It has decreed that 25% of the poppy crop should be eradicated or cut down.
But Daud says many farmers have interpreted that to mean the other 75% is
legal.

Weiner says: "Some of the worst culprits in this illicit trade have even
been our closest allies, the members of the Northern Alliance - the
opposition to the Taliban with whom we worked to retake the nation.

"While they were helping US forces weed out the Taliban, it seems that they
were doing some gardening of their own too."

The question most people are asking now is how, with thousands of US troops
on the ground, there has been a failure to control if not eradicate opium
cultivation.

Many observers in Kabul say that given the approaching election, the
reappearance of the opium trade is hardly surprising.

As one UN source put it: "The US needs [Afghanistan president Hamid]
Karzai, Karzai needs the warlords, and the warlords need opium to finance
themselves, otherwise they get troublesome. It's simply a case of
expediency. What would you do with an election looming?"

Perhaps even more worrying is a UN report suggesting that the problem will
get worse, with two out of every three Afghan farmers planning to increase
their poppy crop in the next year or so.

While this might be Mahmoud Yusef's first year as a poppy farmer, it is
unlikely to be his last.

David Pratt's film report can be seen on STV's Seven Days at noon today