THANKS TO WAR, POPPIES BLANKET AFGHANISTAN AGAIN

(NOOR MOHAMMAD KHAN CHARAI, Afghanistan) -- Mohammad Gul, tattered
shoes planted in the mud, will keep a close watch on his two little
acres in the coming weeks, waiting for the buds to bloom. He won't be
alone.

Five hundred miles up, racing silently through space, U.S.
reconnaissance satellites will be watching, too, camera eyes cocked
for the first signs of vivid red, the flowering of opium poppies.

Here on the edge of Afghanistan's Desert of Death and on east and
north across this deeply poor land, the deadly narcotic is again the
raw material of life and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people.

"All my land is in poppy. I've grown it for 30 years," Mohammad Gul
said. "Every year except one."

That one was last year, when the Taliban, the Muslim zealots who ruled
most of Afghanistan, banned poppy growing as un-Islamic.

Now the Taliban have been scattered to the harsh Afghan hills, ousted
from power in a lightning U.S.-led war, and America and its allies,
including the new Afghan regime of Hamid Karzai, have inherited the
dilemmas of the land of poppy.

Mohammad Gul, who sowed his seeds as he saw the old regime fall, is
thankful.

"We hear that this government's a good one, not cruel like the
Taliban," he told a visitor. "They banned our poppy. I don't think
this new government will come and tear up our crops."

The rout of the Taliban is only one reason this poppy farmer is
indebted to the United States. It was that rich distant nation, after
all, that sent engineers here in the 1950s to build a vast irrigation
project that turned the arid wastes green. Today those canals and
gates channel water to countless fields of poppy along the banks of
the Helmand, the slow, silty river that snakes through the biggest
opium-producing area of the biggest opium-producing country in the
world. On the banks of the far-off Potomac, the challenge of
Afghanistan has kept lights burning late in government offices since
Sept. 11, not least in the glass-sheathed tower of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration in suburban Virginia.

It was a stunning turn of events. From one of the great success
stories in decades of drug wars -- when the Taliban in July 2000 "just
said no" -- Afghanistan has reverted overnight to its role as the Iowa
of opium, the raw stuff of heroin. Early indications are that this
spring's crop will reach the high levels attained before the Taliban
edict, drug enforcement officials say.

Across the Potomac from DEA headquarters, at the State Department,
specialists are conferring with the British, French and other allies
about how to attack the Afghan problem. The Europeans are vitally
concerned; it's their addicts who consume the great bulk of Afghan
heroin.

The British have floated the idea of a straight buy-out of spring
opium production. That might cost several hundred million dollars.
Others stress the need for immediate aid programs steering farmers to
alternative crops. The U.N. Drug Control Program is reopening its
office in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The DEA is planning to move staff
to the U.S. Embassy there.

"The DEA is hopeful that a law-enforcement presence will be put in
place there that is friendly to work with, that will work with the
international community to combat drug trafficking," said DEA
spokesman Will Glaspy.

Despite all the talk and action, however, the spring opium is as good
as harvested. The current interim regime in Kabul is too weak to stop
it.

A few miles from Mohammad Gul's village, in the Helmand province
center of Lashkar Gah, a dust-blown place of donkey carts and earthen
houses, the new local administration takes a pragmatic view.

"This year we're not able to destroy the crops. If we try to enforce a
ban on the farmers, it wouldn't be good for us," Haji Pir Mohammed,
top deputy to Helmand's governor, said in an interview. In muddy lanes
nearby, speedy Toyota pickups, suited for long-distance runs across
the desert, came and went bearing loads of opium.

Poppy has been cultivated in Afghanistan for centuries, but it wasn't
until the wars of the 1980s and 1990s that the red and white flowers
began taking over large swaths of prime farmland. Afghan warlords
shipped out opium gum to finance their militias. By 1994, the United
Nations' annual survey found poppy growing on 177,000 acres, and
Afghanistan was supplying more than 70 percent of the world's opium.
The narcotic had become the country's major source of income.

Heroin use worldwide grew steadily, as well. The U.N. Drug Control
Program now estimates 9 million users globally, 3 million of them in
Europe -- at the end of a processing pipeline that smuggles Afghan
opium through the Middle East or the former Soviet Union, and converts
it into heroin along the way. The number of ruined lives and overdose
deaths goes uncounted.

After the Taliban swept the warlords from power in 1996, the hardline
Islamists opened on-and-off negotiations over opium with the U.N. drug
agency. Finally, in July 2000, Taliban spiritual leader Mullah
Mohammad Omar announced the ban on the crop.

Diplomats believe the Taliban, pariahs because of their violations of
human rights standards, were seeking international respectability and
financial aid. They won some of both. Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary
of state, called it "a decision by the Taliban we welcome." Washington
sent $43 million in emergency aid.

The Taliban may have acted, too, because of the upsurge in addiction
in Afghanistan itself, where users generally smoke opium, rather than
inject refined heroin. "Drug Abuse Is Submission To A Gradual Death,"
declares a lone sign the Taliban posted at the entrance to their
stronghold city of Kandahar.

Last spring, the U.N. agency sent out hundreds of trained workers to
inspect more than 10,000 Afghan villages in its annual survey. In
mid-2001, it reported that the Taliban edict had been almost totally
successful: Opium production was off by 96 percent. The American DEA
agreed, relying on satellite imagery. Fear of the Taliban's stern hand
had all but rid the countryside of poppy.

Then, last October, Washington began its war on the Taliban for
sheltering Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorists, and the drug
fighters saw the sudden remarkable gains in Afghanistan explode among
tons of bombs dropped by American B-52s.

The new Karzai administration did declare its own opium ban on Jan.
17, but it was too late. The farmers had already done their fall poppy
planting.

Economics dictated it. They could earn 10 times more profit from an
acre of opium than from an acre of wheat, and poppy requires less
water, long term, than other crops, a key consideration going into
Afghanistan's fourth year of drought.

Dirt-poor farmers like Mohammad Gul are locked into the poppy cycle in
another way, as well. Drug traffickers advanced loans to many of them
for seed and supplies. Only the harvest will free them from the debt.

Foreign-aid organizations, private and governmental, are re-entering
Afghanistan with plans to encourage alternative crops -- fruit or
cotton, for example. But the challenge is daunting.

"There's no alternative crop near the value of poppy," said Kim
Johnston, operations director for Mercy Corps International. In a
telephone interview from the aid group's Oregon headquarters, Johnston
said more than development aid is needed. "It will work only if
there's a simultaneous commitment from the government to support
eradication through enforcement."

But force and eradication are unlikely anytime soon.

In this land of feuding tribes and clans, the new central leadership
is too weak to risk alienating ordinary Afghan farmers. Besides, it
can't: It has no anti-drug police, in fact no real police force at
all. And it relies on the good will of tribal chieftains and militia
warlords, many of whom themselves have long profited from the heroin
trade.

A long-faced farmer squinted into the gray afternoon light as he took
time to answer a visitor's questions.

"Nobody's come yet from the government," he said. "They're too busy
with a hundred other jobs."

His two young sons went on hurriedly shoveling earth to form the
narrow dikes for poppy plots. He was planting very late, and
reluctantly, after concluding the family would be ruined if they
depended on their money-losing vegetables.

"I know it's wrong. It's bad for human beings. But what can I do?"
said the gray-bearded man. Embarrassed, he wouldn't give his name,
citing his position -- agriculture teacher at a local school.

Across the sluggish Helmand, in "Group Six," a settlement of 100
families, "100 percent" of them planted poppy this year, villagers
said. The 80-year-old village elder, Haji Ghulam Dastagir,
acknowledged the crop was "a bad thing."

"But the people of Afghanistan are very weak and poor. They have no
source of income besides poppy." Erect and dignified in gracefully
coiled white turban, the chief gestured to a neighbor in a filthy
waistcoat. "Look, this man, I know, has no food for tonight."

What's needed, Ghulam Dastagir said, is agricultural machinery, seeds
and other aid from abroad, to lure farmers away from poppy.

"And it must come straight into our hands, the farmers, not to
officials who'll just pocket it."

A half-mile down the gullied track, in this tiny place with a long
name, Mohammad Gul was not looking beyond the late April harvest, when
village children will file out into the fields to slit the bulging
poppy pods, letting opium ooze out, to be followed by expert
harvesters who will scrape the drying lumps into sacks.

The 45-year-old farmer feigned ignorance about the crop he's raised
most of his life. "It all goes to foreign countries -- I don't know
what for."

He was more precise, however, about this spring's payoff, possibly the
equivalent of $16,000 for 120 pounds of opium. Of that, after the
expenses of seed, water, labor, tractor rental and other costs, he
might clear a few thousand dollars, still a rewarding sum in one of
the world's poorest countries.

Mohammad Gul then headed off to tend his two acres, and a visiting
journalist turned to go. Just then a voice rose from the gathered
crowd, here in this village in the heart of the land of poppy.

"Listen, my friend!" the man shouted. "I'll die in my field before I
let anyone destroy my crop!"