AFGHAN FARMLANDS ABLOOM IN POPPIES

NOOR MOHAMMED KHAN CHARAI, Afghanistan (AP) -- Mohammed 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 onward 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," Mr. 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.

Mr. 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 September 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 "just said no" in July 2000 --
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 bulk of Afghanistan's heroin.

The British have floated the idea of a straight buyout 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,
Afghanistan's 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 Mr. 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 there are 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 hard-line
Islamists opened on-and-off negotiations over opium with the U.N. drug
agency. Finally, in July 2000, Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed
Omar announced the ban on the crop.

Diplomats believe the Taliban, pariahs because of their violations of human
rights standards elsewhere, were seeking international respectability and
financial aid. They won some of both. U.S. Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell 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, 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 terrorist organization, al Qaeda (the Base), and the drug
fighters saw the sudden remarkable gains in Afghanistan explode among tons
of bombs dropped from American B-52s.

The new Karzai administration declared 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 poppies require less water, long
term, than other crops -- a key consideration going into Afghanistan's
fourth year of drought.

Dirt-poor farmers like Mr. 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, Miss 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 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 his 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."