U.S. BRACES FOR OPIUM TSUNAMI

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 such as
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 Americans will also encourage the destruction of opium-processing
laboratories and a crackdown on brokers, while providing money 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 P. 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 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.

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 hamper the military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

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

The challenge that American and European officials face is compounded by
the surprising success the Taliban achieved in banning poppy cultivation
two years ago.

That prohibition, after several years in which the Taliban quietly
encouraged poppy farming, cut the country's opium output from an estimated
4,042 tons in 2000, about 71 percent of the world's supply, to just 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. The landholders also offer fertilizer and seed in return for a
portion of the crop.

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 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.

Karzai "can put out a decree not to grow poppy, but it takes a law
enforcement component to enforce that decree," the administrator of the
Drug Enforcement Administration, Asa Hutchinson, told Congress recently.

Now, even though the opium was planted relatively late in the season and
the fields will be affected by a continuing drought, drug control officials
say the conditions are favorable enough to produce a bumper crop.

"We had a brief opportunity to significantly impact their potential to
produce opium," one senior American official involved in the effort said.
"We have lost that opportunity. What is going to occur is that this crop is
going to get out of the ground."

In a preliminary survey in February, the U.N. International Drug Control
Program estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields could reach 111,000 acres
to 161,000 acres. A similar-sized area was cultivated in the mid-1990s; the
crop's peak of 224,918 acres was planted in the fall of 1999 and harvested
in 2000.

While it will be impossible to determine the size of the crop until the
poppies bloom and are harvested over the next two months, some U.S.
estimates are of a crop even larger than that projected by the United Nations.

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

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

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

Initially, U.S. and European officials considered trying to buy up this
year's harvest and then destroy it. That proposal was quickly abandoned,
however, after objections from Germany, Italy and Scandinavian countries
that it would encourage the farmers to plant poppies again next year.

A second proposal was to pay opium farmers to plow under their fields.
While that strategy has also drawn objections from some European countries,
American officials said they would readily try it if they could find people
who could move safely around the countryside, make deals with opium farmers
and then ensure that pledges to eradicate were fulfilled.