DRUG LINK ARISES IN SLAYING PROBE

Assassinated Afghan V.P. Handled Anti-Opium Program

KABUL, Afghanistan - As Afghans around the country mourned the killing of a
vice president, Afghan officials said Sunday that they were investigating
the possibility he had been killed by drug lords who had been
double-crossed during a Western-backed campaign to destroy the country's
poppy crop.

Haji Abdul Qadir, who was shot and killed Saturday, had been overseeing the
Western-financed campaign, which began in April, to root out the poppy crop
in the country. Afghan officials have been paying poppy farmers about $500
per acre to destroy their plants.

A senior Afghan official said Sunday that Qadir had recently complained
that the money was not being distributed to the farmers even though they
were bowing to his demand to uproot their poppies. The Afghan official said
Qadir's efforts, coupled with the failure to pay certain farmers, might
have enraged powerful members of the country's opium trade. Those drug
lords, the Afghan official said, might have decided to take revenge.

"In some instances, there were problems with the flow of the money; there
were people who didn't get any," the Afghan official said. "That was a
concern to Qadir. That is why it is now a concern to us."

Qadir, a wealthy businessman from Jalalabad, had long been suspected of
enriching himself through involvement in the opium trade. Some Afghans
speculated that Qadir might have made enemies by favoring one drug lord
over another.

In the weeks before his death, Qadir had complained to others in Kabul
about his predicament, and he acknowledged his problems in an interview
after he was sworn in as one of the country's vice presidents late last
month. At the time, Qadir said an Afghan organization designated to dole
out the Western money to poppy farmers had kept it instead. But Qadir
indicated that the problem had been resolved.

The Afghan organization "stole the money," Qadir said. "They stopped
distributing the money, but now they will distribute it."

Qadir's troubles came to light a day after a pair of gunmen shot and killed
him in his car as he left his office in downtown Kabul. The killers
escaped, and the police detained 10 government guards for failing to
prevent the attack or to chase his assailants.

Karzai was relying on Qadir, an ethnic Pashtun, to coax members of that
ethnic group, the country's largest, into supporting the government. While
Karzai is himself an ethnic Pashtun, the government he heads is dominated
by ethnic Tajiks, who led the resistance against the Taliban.

Qadir's long involvement in the cutthroat world of Afghan politics ensured
that he had many enemies. He fought against the Taliban, but he belonged to
a political party that once gave shelter to Osama bin Laden. As he emerged
as the governor of Nangarhar province after the rout of the Taliban, he
angered many of his rivals.

The prevailing feeling, among the residents as well as the city's
protectors, was that Qadir's death was probably more related to Qadir
himself than to some enemy conspiracy hatched by the likes of the Taliban
or Al-Qaida.

Any and all of Qadir's faults seemed forgotten Sunday, as Afghans poured
into the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad, his home, to bid him farewell. The
funeral began in the morning, when his flag-draped coffin was carried atop
an artillery piece through the streets of Kabul, accompanied by a line of
soldiers and a military band. The troops, dressed in wrinkled Soviet-era
uniforms and carrying ancient bolt-action rifles, goose-stepped for a time
and then gave up, and the music rose and fell away.

Two of Qadir's Bay Area nephews, Harun Arsalai, 20, of Hayward, and Khushal
Arsala, 31, of Union City, remembered the slain vice president as a
courageous man.

"These things have been going on before I was born," Arsalai said. "Two of
my uncles have disappeared in recent years, it's almost like I'm getting
used to it."

Qadir was the brother of legendary Afghan commander Abdul Haq, whom the
Taliban executed last year.

Arsala who last saw his uncle six years ago, said "it is a great loss for
us personally and for the country."