'NARCOTERRORISM' BOGS DOWN AID EFFORTS IN AFGHANISTAN WHILE DRUG TRADE BLOOMS

A relief worker dies in an ambush on a blind curve up a steep mountain
road. Around the bend is a poppy field, a prime suspect in a murder spree
that's bogging down Afghanistan's rebuilding while its drug trade blooms.

Aid groups are fleeing in terror. They blame much of their exodus from the
southern third of the country on its US$1.2 billion export drug crop, which
purportedly finances Islamic extremist violence, ethnic blood feuds,
warlord war chests, provincial property disputes and competing political
movements.

The agencies that monitor the pulse of conflict zones point to a rise in
ambushes and execution-style slayings that coincide with the southeast's
autumn harvest of the opium-producing flora, nature's gift to the world's
heroin junkies.

"It's absolutely true that security is worse in places where people are
growing poppies," said Diane Johnston, country director for Mercy Corps,
which indefinitely suspended operations in the country last week. A member
of the Omaha, Nebraska-based group was killed on Aug. 7.

"Narcoterrorism" has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the
violence that's meant to keep southern and eastern Afghanistan -- the
world's poppy belt -- off-limits to outside assistance, said Paul Barker,
country director for the charity CARE.

"The revenue from the poppy trade in Afghanistan is more than all the
humanitarian aid combined," he said.

Nations have committed roughly US$500 million to rebuild this central Asian
nation of dusty, gasp-inducing deserts and monolithic mountains. Poppy
revenues brought in US$1.2 billion last year, according to the UN Office of
Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

There are about 90 international relief groups operating in Afghanistan,
but most have curtailed or avoided drilling wells, vaccinating children,
and rebuilding school systems in the deadly southeast.

The September edition of CARE's policy brief -- which other relief groups
follow closely -- said armed attacks on aid workers jumped from one a month
to one every two days since September last year.

Half the country's 32 provinces -- most in the south -- are too risky to
enter. "There are all sorts of movements to keep Afghanistan unstable,"
Barker said.

Local authorities generally blame all violence on the extremist Taliban
movement toppled from power by a US-led force two years ago, but a
confounding array of agendas are in play.

"It's impossible to separate out what's factional fighting, what's Taliban
activity and what's drug trafficking," said Johnston. "We haven't seen this
type of targeting [of aid workers] in the 16 years we've been here."

In March, at the height of the poppy season's spring harvest, gunmen
attacked a three-vehicle convoy at a blind curve in a rocky mountain road
near Dara Noor, a village 96km north of Kandahar and a prime poppy region.
The attackers killed Ricardo Munguia, a 39-year-old water engineer from El
Salvador working for the Red Cross. He was the first foreign aid worker to
die in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster.

Last weekend, assailants ambushed a pickup truck in southern Afghanistan
and shot to death seven bodyguards of the governor of Helmand province, in
the Mir Mundo area 80km northwest of Kandahar.

Afghan officials in general play down the role of opium production in the
country. But the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban was known to
have financed its forces with drug money.

Poppy production in Afghanistan produced 12 percent of the world's opium in
2001, when the Taliban theoretically held down production, and 76 percent
last year.