FIGHTING DRUG CULTIVATION WITH A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Afghan Plan to Ruin Poppies Threatens Farmers' Livelihood

Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan

Abdul Sattar is in charge of the anti-drug agency in the largest
poppy-growing province in the leading opium-producing country in the world.
While sitting on the floor of his office recently, he took inventory: no
desk, no chairs, no phone, no car, 10 men, two guns.

"Our office has nothing -- it's paralyzed," said Sattar, an official on the
front lines of the interim Afghan government's efforts to enforce a ban on
opium cultivation -- imposed largely to please the United States and other
countries that helped topple the Taliban last year. A bumper harvest is
expected in just 10 weeks, he said, but "right now, we're not doing anything."

When the conversation turned to the government's threat to plow under and
destroy the poppies before the harvest, the agency's watchman, a farmer
named Habibullah Zabet, grew angry. With Afghanistan entering the fourth
year of its worst drought in memory, the government's plans would hurt
farmers badly.

"I knew the government would ban opium cultivation, but we had to grow it
because opium needs only a little water," explained Zabet, who said he has
about 125 acres of poppies, which produce raw opium that can be refined
into heroin. "If we cultivate wheat and corn and tomatoes, we can't get the
money back that we paid to plant it."

Listening to his watchman, Sattar smiled forlornly. "Right now, some of my
friends are upset with me," he said. "I have many friends and relatives
growing poppies. Even some of my brothers grow it."

Afghanistan's poppy fields are the ultimate source of about 80 percent of
the heroin in Europe, drug experts say, and 95 percent of the heroin in
Britain. Even though little Afghan opium makes it to U.S. streets, American
officials say they are keenly focused on eradicating the drug in
Afghanistan because it was a key source of funding for Taliban and al Qaeda
operations, possibly even the terrorist attacks against the United States.

"Drugs and terror go side by side, and we are the victim of that," said
Ahmed Wali Karzai, a top official in Kandahar and the younger brother of
Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai. "The world community helped us
defeat terrorism and it needs to help us defeat this evil. We cannot solve
this problem by ourselves."

A year ago, Afghanistan achieved the near-impossible: It almost eradicated
its opium crop on orders from the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, who said
that cultivating drugs violated Islamic tenets. Afghanistan ranked as the
world's largest producer of opium in 2000, with an output of more than
3,600 tons, or about 75 percent of the world's supply, according to U.N.
statistics. But last year the country produced just 206 tons -- a decline
of 94 percent.

Many analysts say they believe the Taliban's real aim in imposing the ban
was to control the opium market and drive up prices that had fallen
steeply. Whatever the motive, the prohibition was carried out, largely
because people feared being killed if they were caught violating it,
farmers here say.

"What happened was an historic event," said Leslie Oqvist, a top U.N.
official who has been stationed in Kandahar for more than five years.
"Afghanistan was the biggest opium producer in the world, and then in one
year, it was almost totally gone."

"We can do it again, but we need to give them alternatives," he said. "You
cannot take a piece of bread from a starving man and expect him to lay down
and die."

The virtual eradication of poppies, however, did not erase Afghanistan's
drug problem. Experts estimate that there are still about 2,200 tons of raw
opium stockpiled in Afghanistan, and they say this year's harvest could add
another 2,000 to 3,000 tons.

The interim government is eager to ensure that the stockpiles cannot be
replenished. Its official position is that the poppies will be destroyed,
with no compensation to the farmers who planted them, lest they replant
next year so as to be repaid again. The hope in Kabul is that international
aid agencies will step into the breach with programs that help farmers
switch to legal crops.

Much of the effort will be focused here in southern Afghanistan's Helmand
province. About twice the size of Maryland, the province grows about 57
percent of the country's opium crop. Anti-drug officials, aid workers and
farmers agree that almost every landowner in the area has planted poppies.

The farmers have strong incentives: Wheat needs more than twice as much
water as poppies, and at current values, a poppy crop is 32 times more
valuable. Today, a half-acre of poppies would produce opium worth about
$3,500, compared with $108 for wheat from a plot of equal size.

"It's too difficult to ban or destroy this year's crop without giving the
farmers something in return," said Helmand Gov. Sher Mohammed.
"Politically, the people will rise up against the government" if it wipes
out their poppy harvest, he said.

Sattar, the anti-drug chief, said he feared armed clashes with poppy
growers. In interviews, farmers themselves said they would defend their
fields, most of which were planted in November and December, before the
interim government announced its prohibition in mid-January.

"If the government comes to destroy our field, we won't let them -- we'll
fight," said Abdul Rashid, a laborer in a poppy field on the outskirts of
Girishk, a small desert town about 20 miles northeast of Lashkar Gah.

But Yusuf Pashtun, spokesman for Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai, played
down the possibility of violence, saying people were "fed up" with it.

Besides, he said, "if we don't eradicate this year's crop we will lose the
support of the international community, and that's more important to
Afghanistan right now than a few 100 or 1,000 families in the countryside."

Poppies have helped finance wars for years and remain an integral part of a
wartime economy. Farmers receive cash advances to plant the crop, and they
often repay the loans with a percentage of their harvest. Field workers are
also paid with a percentage of the yield. If the crop is destroyed, farmers
fear that loans received in the past year will be almost impossible to repay.

Zabet, the watchman, said that during the Taliban's ban he sowed wheat on
his land that cost almost 6 cents per pound to plant and harvest. It
brought only 3 1/2 cents per pound at market, though, leaving him unable to
pay off about $3,700 in debts at the end of the season. This year, he had
to take out another $5,800 loan to plant his poppy crop.

"I don't want to grow poppies -- I have to do it," he said. "It's against
Islam, it's against humanity, it's against international law -- it's
against everything. But we have nothing else to do."

That the U.S. and Western military campaign against the Taliban has
liberated Afghan farmers to again plant poppies is not the only irony.
Helmand province -- which in a good year produces more than 40 percent of
the world's raw opium -- yields as much as it does in part because of a
U.S. funded project 50 years ago to dam the Helmand River.

Finished in 1953, the 300-foot-high, 887-foot-long Kajaki Dam, located
about 65 miles northwest of Lashkar Gah, created a 32-mile-long reservoir
that now feeds thousands of miles of canals that crisscross parts of
Helmand and Kandahar provinces, creating oases where poppies thrive.

Farmers here say they appreciate the role the United States and other
countries played in vanquishing the Taliban. They do not want to repay
that, they said, by sending death and addiction to the West.

"We understand that it's killing people, and if the U.S. or U.N. helps us,
we pledge not to grow it, but we have no choice," said Tawaz, 40, a poppy
laborer. "It's not a matter of the drought, it's just the money. If we grow
wheat, we cannot feed our families."

What they want and need, farmers and aid workers said, is basic development
aid -- programs that would build roads, hospitals and schools, expand the
network of canals to facilitate the cultivation of other crops, open
factories for alternative types of employment and give farmers credit,
access to foreign markets, high-yield and drought-resistant seeds,
fertilizers and tractors.

Juma Gull and his family share a 125-acre poppy plot with five other
families in Ainak, a small farming community about five miles outside
Lashkar Gah. The group has taken out about $10,000 in loans to plant the
field and feed themselves, he said, and they hope to split a profit of
about $33,000 after the harvest.

The families have a total of about 80 children, and last year, when the
Taliban banned poppy cultivation, he said, they left the land barren and
the men emigrated to Iran to find work.

"The government of the Taliban banned poppies, but they did nothing for us
in return and did not attack any of our problems," said Mohammed Akka, 55,
one of the partners in the field. " . . . If this government does the same
thing, it won't succeed either."