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 occurred.'' 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.