POPPIES AIDING TALIBAN FIGHT AGAINST U.S., NATO

Afghan Farmers Ignoring Crop Ban

CHINAR, Afghanistan - When the Taliban ordered Afghanistan's fields
cleared of opium poppies seven years ago because of Islam's ban on
drugs, fearful farmers complied en masse.

Today, officials say the religious militia nets tens of millions of
dollars by forcing farmers to plant poppies and taxing the harvest,
driving the country's skyrocketing opium production to fund the fight
against what they consider an even greater evil: U.S. and NATO troops.

"Drugs are bad. The Koran is very clear about it," said Gafus
Scheltem, NATO's political adviser in southern Afghanistan. But to
fight the enemy, he said, "all things are allowed. They need money,
and the only way they can get money is from Arabs that support them
in the gulf, or poppies."

Corrupt government officials, both low-level police and high-level
leaders, also protect the drug trade in exchange for bribes, a recent
U.N. report found. Warlords and major landowners welcome the
instability the Taliban brings to the country's southern regions,
causing poppy eradication efforts to fail.

The Taliban denies it supports poppies. Mullah Abdul Qassim, a top
commander in Helmand province, told the Associated Press last month
that the militia's goal is to defeat foreign troops and it doesn't
have time to regulate poppies. He stated that the militia virtually
eliminated poppies after leader Mullah Mohammad Omar banned them in July 2000.

Diplomats at the time believed the Taliban, pariah because of its
violations of human rights, was seeking international respectability
and financial aid. Washington sent $43 million in emergency funds to
Afghanistan after poppy growing was banned.

But Western officials say it appears the ban was meant at least in
part to increase the price of opium stockpiles.

"Originally they said, 'It's bad for you, it's against Islam,' but
when they realized how much money they could make off of it, they
said it was OK to grow but not consume it. That's the hypocrisy of
it," said Spec. Zach Khan, a cultural adviser in the U.S. Army who
was born in Pakistan.

The Taliban is also telling farmers in the south they must grow
poppies but if the militia returns to power, the plants will once
again be outlawed, said a Western official familiar with
Afghanistan's drug trade who asked not to be identified because of
the nature of his job.

Afghanistan's opium crop grew 59 percent in 2006 to 407,000 acres,
yielding a record crop of 6,100 tons, enough to make 610 tons of
heroin - 90 percent of the world's supply, according to the U.N.
Western and Afghan officials who say they expect a similar crop this year.

The street value of the heroin was estimated at $3.5 billion, said
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs
and Crime. Of that, Afghan farmers earned an estimated $700 million
last year, while the bulk of the rest went to traffickers who
smuggled the drugs to the Middle East and Europe.

No one knows the Taliban's exact take from poppy cultivation, and
guesses range from the low tens of millions of dollars to an estimate
of $140 million by Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan's deputy minister for
counternarcotics.

The Taliban uses the money to buy weapons and pay soldiers, and as
one Western official put it: "You can buy quite a bit of insurgency
for $10 million."

For farmers, poppies pay up to 10 times as much as wheat. Militants
protect the poppy fields, and corrupt government officials are paid
to turn a blind eye.

"The Taliban need the money, and the narco traffickers need the
instability. In chaos, there's profit," U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brian
Mennes said during a recent mission in southern Afghanistan.

The Taliban takes a cut all along the way - a percentage at harvest,
at heroin labs, and to ensure the crop's passage through dangerous
lands, Costa said.

"Out of an opium economy of about $3.5 billion, you get a significant
amount of money, which could be potentially seen as the funding of
terrorism," Costa said last month.