AFGHANISTAN STRUGGLE TO STOP OPIUM BONANZA

SANGIN (SANA) -- The world's heroin pipeline is preparing for an
unprecedented Afghan bumper crop despite the new government's proclamations
outlawing it and the international community's promise to destroy it. The
illegal but very public and defiant growing of opium is a major source of
embarrassment for the interim Afghan government and the Western allies
supporting the new administration with money and military might.

It shows, too, the vast extent of lawlessness that continues unchecked in
much of the country after 23 years of civil war and shadow governments,
reports the Chicago Tribune.

"We are powerless to stop it," said Haji Pir Mohammed, the top assistant to
the governor of Helmand province, center of the region where up to 90
percent of the world's heroin originates.

"So we will do nothing." Opium produces at least 10 times the profits other
crops do, and even farmers who had never planted poppy fields are getting
in on the bonanza this season.

"God willing, this will be the best year we have ever had," said Haji Ala
Mohammed, 65, standing in the rows of plants on his land, which has
produced opium for a quarter-century.

The American-led bombing of Afghanistan was designed to rid the country of
the Taliban regime, the Arabs it harbored and the flourishing drug network
supported by them.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair made destroying Afghanistan's opium
fields a key part of his pitch for national support of the war.

Vowing that "violators will be dealt with severely," the interim Afghan
government announced with great fanfare in January that the cultivation and
trafficking of opium were banned.

But Afghan leaders have no muscle to enforce the declaration.

Anti-drug patrols are mostly a ragtag army of provincial soldiers who have
not been paid in months because the government is broke.

Thousands of the military men work behind the scenes in support of opium
business, the government acknowledges.

Meanwhile, outlaw warlords-thrilled that the U.S. got rid of the Taliban
for them-are the guardians of the drug trade.

There are reports in the Helmand region of weapons and rocket launchers
being stockpiled to protect growers, sellers and smugglers from government
or foreign assault.

In this dusty village, which thrives solely on opium production, buyers and
sellers in the markets are already calculating their huge takes from the
spring harvest.

Smugglers are plotting routes and hiring couriers to ferry the plastic bags
of opium to heroin labs in Afghanistan and then ship the finished product
to neighboring Iran, Pakistan and the former Soviet republics.

The opium trade has flourished here for decades.

Profits helped pay for the resistance movement against Russian occupation,
militant Arab training in Afghanistan and the financing of the brutal
Taliban regime.

"Everyone I know is involved in this trade-tens of thousands of people,"
the government's Mohammed said from the provincial seat in Lashkar Gah, 40
rugged miles to the south.

"We can't throw a whole population in jail.

There are not enough jails in the world to hold all of them.

And if we throw just one of them in jail, we will have a revolt that we
cannot handle." Interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai said recently
that he will not hesitate to call for American or international troops to
help fight enemy warlords destabilizing the country.

But the U.S. role is mostly confined to hunting down Taliban and Al-Qaida
and advising Karzai.

The international peacekeepers patrol only in Kabul.

U.S. bombs concentrated mostly on terrorist targets and did not aim for
opium fields so as not to inflame passions among thousands of poor farmers,
a Western diplomat in Kabul said.

The Karzai government does not favor aerial eradication and says it will be
used only as a last resort if growers resist government orders.

Troops and tractors: In neighboring Kandahar, provincial officials said
they would take it upon themselves to send Afghan troops and tractors to
destroy opium fields in Helmand as the crop grows taller this spring.

When pressed on specifics, however, provincial leader Yusef Pashtun said
only: "Let's just say we will do it.

We will enforce the government ban." But a clearly chagrined Bush
administration admitted last week that Afghanistan continues to fail
miserably in combating drug cultivation.

U.S. law prohibits paying foreign farmers for their opium or its destruction.

But as American officials push Afghanistan's neighbors to be more vigilant
in drug interdiction at the borders, they are considering a program to
reimburse growers for the cost of plowing their crops under.

"Then what am I supposed to do? Go beg in the bazaar?" said farmer
Mohammed, who like many farmers in these dusty parts scoffed at suggestions
that they would take a pittance for a crop that is worth about $150 per
pound on the open market.