BIG HARVEST OF OPIUM EXPECTED

American officials have quietly abandoned their hopes of reducing
Afghanistan's opium production substantially this year and are now bracing
for a harvest large enough to inundate the world's heroin and opium markets
with cheap drugs.

While American and European officials have considered measures like paying
Afghan opium poppy farmers to plow under their fields, they have concluded
that continuing lawlessness and political instability will make significant
reduction all but impossible.

Instead, U.S. officials said, they will pursue a less ambitious strategy:
persuading Afghan leaders to carry out a modest eradication program as
opium poppies are harvested over the next two months, if only to show they
were serious in declaring a ban on production in January.

The Americans will also encourage the destruction of opium-processing
laboratories and a crackdown on brokers, while providing funds to
strengthen anti-smuggling activities by neighboring countries. The campaign
is being strongly backed and even to some extent led by Britain, which
traces nearly all the heroin on its streets to Afghanistan.

But the continuing upheaval in and around Afghanistan will limit the
effectiveness of those strategies, American and British officials admit,
making it likely that Afghanistan will produce enough opium to dominate the
world supply once again.

"The fact is, there are no institutions in large parts of the country,"
said the Bush administration's drug policy director, John Walters. "What we
can do will be extremely limited."

Reducing the output of opium is a major goal of the international
rebuilding effort in Afghanistan.

Until the Taliban, Afghanistan's Islamic former rulers, banned the
cultivation of opium poppies in their last year in power, Afghanistan
produced as much as three-fourths of the world's supply, and taxes on the
drug trade were an important source of revenue. Now, the profits that
flowed to local leaders aligned with the Taliban are expected to enrich
tribal leaders and warlords whose support is vital to the American-backed
interim government.

As long as the drug trade flourishes, law enforcement officials said, it
will fuel political rivalries, foster corruption and undermine the
authority of the central government.

But because opium poppy farming remains one of the few viable economic
activities, officials added, any intense eradication effort could imperil
the stability of the government and thus hamper the military campaign
against the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorist network.

"The fight against terrorism takes priority," one British law enforcement
official said. "The fight against narcotics comes in second."

The Taliban achieved surprising success in banning poppy cultivation two
years ago. That prohibition cut the country's opium output from an
estimated 4,042 tons in 2000, about 71 percent of the world's supply, to 82
tons the next year, according to the CIA.

What little opium Afghanistan produced in 2001 came almost entirely from
the 10 percent of its territory then controlled by the Northern Alliance,
the backbone of the new government.

But the decline in the harvest left many small landowners and sharecroppers
deeply in debt. In the absence of any rural-credit system, larger
landholders customarily lend smaller poppy farmers and laborers food,
cooking oil or money for the winter, to be paid back after the harvest of
opium gum.

Diplomats and relief officials in Afghanistan said a considerable number of
refugees fleeing into Pakistan with their families were opium farmers who
could not pay their debts. But as soon as the Taliban's military resistance
began to crumble last fall, many other farmers rushed to plant opium once
again.

On Jan. 17, with strong encouragement from the United States and the United
Nations, Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, announced a new ban on
poppy cultivation. His prohibition went beyond the Taliban's decree to
include processing and trafficking, which the Taliban had tolerated and, to
some extent, profited from.

While foreign officials have applauded Karzai's ban, it was issued only
after the poppies had been planted and without any viable means of
implementation.