THE OPIUM TRAIL

A Village At Source Of Heroin Trade Fears Crop Eradication

SANGIN, Afghanistan -- The heroin trade that ends on the streets of Europe
and America often begins here, in the Afghan countryside, with luckless
tenant farmers like Abdul Hakim.

"The Americans already bombed Afghanistan, so you might as well destroy the
fields, and then you might as well kill me too," Mr. Hakim, 52, shouted in
Lear-like rage on a recent day.

He was trotting through his poppy field, flinging fertilizer on the
livelihood that he was sure his government had come to destroy. His 9-
year-old son, one of the 14 children and two wives to be fed, was at his side.

"People want a lot of money from me," he said, referring to his debts. "I
have no choice."

Mr. Hakim's situation is pitiable, but his bankrupt government's is equally
so. Donor countries, primarily the United States, have indicated that aid
may depend on the destruction of this year's poppy crop.

Afghanistan's government risks their sanction by turning a blind eye to the
crop, but it risks the wrath of men like Mr. Hakim, and those who make the
real profit from his labor, by destroying it. Poppies are by far the best
crop in much of this drought-parched land.

Like most Afghan poppy farmers, Mr. Hakim last year acceded to the
Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation. The strictly enforced ban reduced the
opium yield by about 95 percent but also left hundreds of thousands of
farmers jobless and hungry. It turned many into refugees, and others, like
Mr. Hakim, into bigger debtors. It also turned them against the Taliban.

Last fall, with the Taliban under siege, Mr. Hakim and hundreds of
thousands of others rushed into the interregnum with poppy seeds in hand.
By the time Afghanistan's new interim government banned poppy cultivation
too, in January, the planting had been done.

Now, all across the southwest and east, rows of weedlike greenery have
thrust through the mud and dirt. Within two months the plants will be
poppies in bloom, topped by capsules heavy with opium resin.

A recent United Nations survey estimated that this year Afghanistan might
produce 2,100 to 3,000 tons of opium, heroin's raw material. That is less
than the 1999 record of 5,000 tons, but far more than last year's yield.

So now the government must decide whether to eradicate this year's crop
and, if it does, whether -- and how -- to compensate the farmers.

The governor of Kandahar, who putatively also rules Helmand and the rest of
the southwest, has said the fields will be destroyed without compensation.
To compensate would be to bribe, said Kandahar's antidrug chief, Ahmadullah
Alizai, 28, not mentioning that there is also no bribe money to be had.

For now, no one seems to have a plan for eradication, no one has the
resources and at the local level, it seems, not many have the heart.

Helmand Province produces just over half of Afghanistan's opium. Poppies
require about half the water of wheat and yield about 10 times the profit.
Farmers with large families and little land say they have no other way to live.

Men like Mr. Hakim do not get rich. For his toil he will come away with
nothing except the right to toil again next year. He owes $550, for the
food, clothes and other staples he bought during last year's ban, and for
the seeds, fertilizer and tractor rental for this year's harvest.

Landowners and opium traders have often made poppy cultivation, which is
far more labor-intensive than growing wheat, a condition of access to land
and credit. Mr. Hakim's half-acre is owned by his smirking, much younger
neighbor, Ahmad Shah, 20, who will take half of Mr. Hakim's yield.

For now, the interim government has banned the buying and selling of opium,
which the Taliban left unhindered -- in part, Afghans say, because the
mullahs profited from the sales. Under their rule, opium bazaars like the
one in Sangin, a dusty market town, flourished. About 200 merchants
brazenly sold wet and dry opium, mostly to Iranians cruising through in
four-wheel-drive vehicles.

But at the end of February the Karzai government ordered the shops closed
down. A week later the only indication that Muhammad Qasem, 35, ever sold
anything other than gas burners in his small store were the brown stains
over the doorway and the pungent smell inside.

"The men who buy from me will know where to find me," he said. "No one can
stop the smuggling until we have jobs, factories, schools."

Just about everyone in this district is tied into the poppy crop. The
deputy mayor, a military commander, has an opium shop. The director of
education owns two acres of poppy fields. The elders who run the local
decision-making council grow poppies too. With the stores closed, they said
they would hide their stockpiles and arrange liaisons with buyers in the
vast desert or nearby mountains.

It would take uncommon courage to stop the smuggling. The district chief in
Nad-i-Ali, Afghanistan's most prolific poppy producing district, was killed
recently. The elders heard that he had gone to investigate a report about
men transporting opium.

Drug traffickers have long wielded their own cruel power here. In the
1980's and early 1990's much of the poppy crop in Helmand was controlled by
a family of strict mullahs led by Mullah Nasim Akhundaza, local people say.

Today, Mullah Nasim's nephew is the governor of Helmand and a close ally of
Hamid Karzai, the leader of the interim national government. The nephew,
Mullah Shir Muhammad Akhundaza, who is in his 30's, said he did not think
the poppies in his territory would be eradicated this year unless someone
paid the farmers. Otherwise the people would starve, he said, and turn
against him.

Mr. Akhundaza, like every new leader in Afghanistan, is watching his back,
and not just because two uncles of his were assassinated. He knows that
well-financed drug barons could easily arm dissatisfied rivals. "Next year
we will definitely stop," the governor said of his province's poppy habit.

Fear and politics aside, practical exigencies may decide the day.

Abdul Sattar, 27, is the antidrug chief of Helmand Province, theoretically
responsible for eradicating up to 100,000 acres of poppies. He works in a
totally bare office and has 10 employees but no money to pay them, two
Kalashnikovs and no car.

Mr. Sattar was asked what job he wanted in the government and chose this
one because he had taken a drug control course in Pakistan -- all of four
days, consisting mainly of mullahs saying that people should be told that
drugs are against Islam.

"You know the people are compelled to grow these poppy fields," he said.
"The foreign community or U.N. should give some money to the farmers."

Mr. Sattar listened as the elders of Sangin described the effects of the
drought, now in its fourth year, and of a canal system clogged with silt.
All of them were ensnared in a web of debt, they said, their lives like
unsolvable word problems.

To get cash, many farmers essentially sell their poppy crops in advance, at
about half the rate they would get when harvest came around. That is what
Abdul Wahid, 35, did, to get $700 to plant the one and a half acres he
rents and to get his wife to a doctor in Pakistan.

At harvest he must give his creditor, a shopkeeper named Abdul Bari, who
also is 35, 20 pounds of opium, with which Mr. Bari would double his
investment.

"If he doesn't give it to me I'll go the government and have him put in
jail," Mr. Bari said, noting in his own defense that he owed $1,166 to a
Kandahar shopkeeper for extending him credit.

The stories were all the same. "This year we don't have enough time to
cultivate something else," Hajji Masoon said, popping his teeth into his
mouth so he would be clearly heard. "Please, this year let us harvest. Next
year we promise we won't."

Mr. Sattar listened quietly. "I don't know what to say, or do," he said
afterward.

If ordered, he said, he will destroy the fields by force, but he said he
hoped that it would not come to that. Like most Afghans, the people in
Helmand are well armed. And they are his people; his own brothers have
poppy crops.

He said the mullahs' advice -- to tell people that drugs are against Islam
- -- would not work. The Taliban sowed cynicism, not faith, so the farmers
believe that the original ban's only purpose was to allow Taliban or Arabs
who had stockpiled opium and poppy fields to cash in.

They knew drugs were bad, but so was hunger. "It is against Islam, it is
against human beings, it is against international law, it is against
everything, but it is something we have to do," Hajji Abibullah, the
watchman at Mr. Sattar's office and a district police chief, said of his
own poppy fields.

In truth, said Abdul Hakim, the raging farmer of Sangin, Islam compells a
man to do whatever is necessary to feed his family, and so he will.

A bit down the dusty road, a boy knelt for his afternoon prayers in a poppy
field.