AFGHANS STRUGGLE WITH ENFORCING LAWS

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - Kandahar is the hub of the region that was
once the source of most of the world's opium. But the chief of the
anti-narcotics police has no treatment facilities for locals who become
addicted to their own product.

He keeps hundreds of pounds of confiscated opium, heroin and other
impounded drugs in a shipping container in the yard outside his office for
lack of a better place.

But Mohammed Hakim has chairs and even an old telephone that allows him to
communicate with other offices at police headquarters: It's more than can
be said for the district court, where the rooms are bare and all the legal
volumes are gone, allegedly looted by the Taliban as they fled U.S. bombing.

"We're starting from zero," said chief judge Abdul Ahad Iman, one of the
few officials who has a desk.

Police work, and executing justice in the courts, is just getting off the
ground in Kandahar, the last stronghold of the Taliban before their downfall.

As much of the foreign aid earmarked for Afghanistan is being funneled
through the capital, institutions here are weak and many local government
employees are working without pay. Authorities also face a lawless culture
spawned by more than two decades of war and factional fighting.

The Kandahar district court has six judges for the city's several hundred
thousand residents. Ahad, an Afghan judge during the rule of King Mohammed
Zaher Shah decades ago, was summoned from his home in Pakistan by
Kandahar's new governor, Gul Agha. Sunday was his 20th day on the job.

"The Taliban took everything: furniture, books, even the witness box. We're
hoping Kabul will send us some legal volumes," said the turban- clad Hamad,
who spoke with rhetorical flourishes and vigorous hand gestures.

On the desk of one judge was a 1989 gazette published by the Justice
Ministry. Dusty, yellowing case files were strewn on the floor behind a
file cabinet in another chamber.

Using a mix of Islamic and secular legal codes, Ahad judges cases in his
office because there is no furniture in the pillared courtroom.

The judges mostly handle land and other civil disputes, and few criminal
cases have come their way. Hakim said he has arrested three small-time drug
pushers in his three months as anti-narcotics chief.

Afghanistan was the world's major supplier of opium, from which heroin is
made, until the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in 2000. As Taliban
authority collapsed late last year, farmers quickly replanted the crop,
posing a challenge to the weak new government's efforts to wipe it out.

Harvesting has already begun.

Most heroin made in the region is exported to Europe, but it attracts a
steady pool of addicts in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan and Iran and
there is nothing police can do to get them treatment, Hakim said.

"We don't have anywhere to put the drug addicts," said Hakim, who got his
job soon after the Taliban quit Kandahar in December.

Gun control is another challenge for police, who require firearm owners to
have a permit or be working for one of the many local militia commanders
posted around the city.

A variety of shotguns, said to be used for hunting birds and other game,
were on display in a cluster of Kandahar gun shops. Owners said the new
government had banned them from selling Kalashnikov assault rifles, the
weapon of choice during the fight against the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s
and in more recent Afghan conflicts.

But gunsmith Mohammed Saleem, who was fixing a soldier's grenade launcher
on a recent afternoon for the equivalent of $5, said it was easy to buy an
assault rifle from private sellers for about $100.

"You can't get them in the open market, but everybody has one in their
house," he said.

Kandahar is relatively quiet, but the firing of a rocket Friday night near
the governor's office was a reminder of how violence can easily erupt in
the war-weary nation. No one was hurt, and police detained several people
for questioning.

A new illegal arrival in Kandahar is alcohol, sold at the al-Habib General
Store on the road to the airport. Storekeeper Fazal Raham sometimes
displays 15-ounce cans of Pakistani beer on the counter.

Raham said police raided his shop last week, but could not read the can
labels because they were illiterate. So they confiscated hundreds of cans
and bottles of fruit juice and other nonalcoholic drinks, later returning
half the goods.

"Bring on the American liquor!" declared Ghulam Sakhi, a soldier who
stopped by the general store to buy a can of beer for 300 Pakistani rupees,
or $5.

"The commander hasn't paid us, and we can't afford it," said Sakhi, his
eyes glazed from smoking hashish. "But if we find some money, then we'll
buy one or two cans."