BITTER HARVEST: AMERICA'S DEFEAT OF THE TALIBAN SETS BACK THE WAR ON DRUGS

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-fast, U.S.-led war, and the United States 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.

Too late for action this year

On the banks of the far-off Potomac River, 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 heartland 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 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, 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," DEA spokesman Will Glaspy said.

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 production makes comeback

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 hard-line
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 that 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 already had 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.

New regime too weak to intervene

Dirt-poor farmers such as 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 Portland 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 goodwill of tribal chieftains and militia warlords, many of whom
themselves have long profited from the heroin trade.

"I know it's wrong... but...."

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 that 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?" the man
said. 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 that the crop
was "a bad thing."