U.S. ALTERS PLAN TO CURB OPIUM

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

Although 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 eradication 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 that
they were serious in declaring a ban on production in January.

The United States 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 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, U.S. and British officials acknowledge,
making it likely that Afghanistan will produce enough opium to dominate the
world supply again.

"The fact is, there are no institutions in large parts of the country,"
said John P. Walters, the Bush administration's drug policy director. "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 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 U.S.-backed interim government.

So 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 al Qaeda.

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

Although it will be impossible to determine the size of this year's opium
poppy crop until the poppies bloom and are harvested over the next two
months, some U.S. estimates expect a crop large enough to provide a
substantial stockpile.

"What is scary about this is that it really could give them enough opium to
stockpile for two or 2 1/2 more years," a senior American official said.

Afghanistan's record harvest in 2000 was so large that opium dealers and
traffickers set aside huge amounts of the drug, keeping heroin prices
remarkably stable in countries such as Britain and Germany even when the
world supply plummeted in 2001 because of the Afghans' ban.

Even now, U.N. officials said, those stockpiles hold enough opium to supply
customers in Europe, Central Asia and other countries of the former Soviet
Union for perhaps another year.