ERADICATION

Afghans Announce Victories In A New War Against Opium

KABUL, Afghanistan - Ten days into its ambitious program to cut off
supplies of opium, the interim government announced yesterday that it had
destroyed poppy fields that might produce more than 100 tons of the drug,
with a European street value of $600 million.

In the first week of eradication in the country's two largest poppy-growing
provinces, Helmand and Nangahar, authorities used tractors and sticks to
destroy just over 5,000 acres of poppies, and paid farmers almost $3
million in compensation, said Ashraf Ghani, chief adviser to interim leader
Hamid Karzai. While the street value of the destroyed crop may sound high,
it represents a small fraction of this year's predicted opium harvest.

With estimates of up to 160,000 acres of poppies planted last fall, Afghan
farmers expected to turn the crop into more than 3,000 tons of opium this
year, according to surveys by the UN Drug Control Program and the Afghan
government. Ghani said eradication would expand to four other poppy-growing
provinces and would finish in three weeks. ''We are in a race against
time,'' he said, acknowledging that harvesting has begun in some places.

But if destruction continues at the current pace, only 14 percent of the
poppy crop will be eliminated - and Afghanistan could still be the world's
largest supplier of opium this year. ''We will not have time to effect
complete eradication,'' Ghani said, but he asserted that ''a significant
change in attitudes has occured.'' Some voluntary eradication has begun, he
said, adding that authorities have gotten promises from farmers not to grow
poppies again next year. In the 1990s, Afghanistan became the world's main
producer of opium, the narcotic from which heroin is derived, until a
strict ban on poppy cultivation by the Taliban in 2000 reduced last year's
harvest to almost zero. But when the Taliban's days appeared numbered
during the US-led war last fall, farmers replanted poppies, before a ban
issued by the new government on Jan. 17. Ghani denied allegations made by
farmers in Helmand Province that Karzai (who secretly entered neighboring
Uruzgan Province last October to drum up anti-Taliban forces) had promised
to let farmers plant poppies if they helped him topple the hard-line
Islamist regime. Ghani said that he had met recently with 400 Helmand
farmers, and that ''not a single person raised this issue.'' The
eradication program appears to be going more smoothly than early signs had
suggested.

Two weeks ago in Helmand, police killed eight farmers and wounded dozens
who had been protesting the program.

In Nangahar, farmers blocked roads and pelted vehicles with stones, and
authorities threatened to halt the eradication program if compensation
money wasn't paid more quickly.

Farmers are being paid $700 an acre for their planting and irrigation
costs, more than they would have made for harvesting wheat.

Ghani acknowledged that there ''is some danger of fraud,'' but said that
the compensation is a ''one-time deal.'' The money is being donated by the
British government, the US Agency for International Development, the World
Bank, and the European Union. (Afghanistan is the leading source of opium
on the streets of Britain.) International donors have made aid to
Afghanistan all but contingent on efforts to cut off the supply of illicit
drugs.

But Ghani said his government is not basing its anti-opium campaign on the
amount of aid received. ''We have a moral compact with the world'' to
eliminate the poppy crop, he said. But the best way to prevent cultivation,
he said, is for donors to create lucrative alternatives, as well as viable
lines of credit for farmers who now take loans from drug dealers.