THE DEADLIEST HARVEST

Afghan aid groups fleeing drug violence

DARA NOOR, Afghanistan - 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 series of killings
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 $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, Neb.-based group was killed Aug. 7.

"Narcoterrorism" has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the
violence that is 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 $500 million to rebuild this central Asian
nation of dusty deserts and monolithic mountains. Poppy revenues brought in
$1.2 billion last year, according to the U.N. 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 2002.

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 U.S.-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."

The violence has grown with the poppy production in Afghanistan, which
produced 12 percent of the world's opium in 2001 and 76 percent last year.

The fact that drug trafficking revenues have soared since the U.S. push into
Afghanistan has put the Bush administration on the defensive.

"You ask what we're going to do and the answer is, 'I don't really know,'"
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said recently.